DVD: WAITRESS

"A Wonderfully-Eccentric Charmer..."

Several months ago, I remember reading a horribly fascinating story in PEOPLE Magazine, about a new movie coming out starring fresh-faced Keri Russell and one of my all-time favorite HOT actors, Nathan Fillion. The movie was a smallish film called Waitress, also starring, and written and directed by, a quirky independent film actress, Adrienne Shelly.

The movie, described as "a sprightly comic drama," premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in January 2007. People Magazine reported:

"Though there are plenty of movies that stir emotional responses at the Sundance Film Festival, for pure poignancy it would be hard to match Sunday afternoon's premiere of Waitress, a movie written, directed by and costarring Adrienne Shelly, who was murdered last fall in New York City.

Shelly, 40, best known for her appearances in such indie standouts as Factotum and Trust, was murdered in Manhattan last November, allegedly by a workman who was renovating a Greenwich Village apartment one floor below her office. They had a confrontation after Shelly complained about the noise..."

For more about that tragedy, initially reported as a suicide and then discovered to be a murder, see Star's Suicide Was Killer Cover-Up from The New York Post, November 7, 2006.

It was such a horrifying, random tragedy, the untimely death of a talented woman who was not quite famous, as far as all-out celebrity status goes, but was certainly on her way. Not to mention the loss of a young wife and mother of a 2-year-old daughter, Sophie, who appears at the end of the movie as Keri Russell's child. (The movie was completed before Adrienne Shelly's death in November 2006.)

We finally got to see Waitress on DVD, and it is a wonderfully-eccentric charmer of dysfunctional life in Small Town, America, with a gorgeous, but terribly unhappy young pie waitress, Jenna (Keri Russell), planning her escape from her abusive, controlling husband, Earl (a caricature played by Jeremy Sisto). It is not as dark as it sounds, especially when all of life's troubles can be soothed with a specialty pie (the sweet kind, not pizza).

Jenna is supported by her waitress girlfriends at the diner (again, caricatures of southern Waffle House waitresses played by Cheryl Hines and Adrienne Shelly, in a quirky, understated, genuinely funny performance) and an unlikely benefactor in the elderly town big shot, a cantankerous Andy Griffith, who stole the movie. (How cool is it to see Sheriff Taylor (or Matlock, for you youngsters) come back decades later as an incorrigible old man: crusty, mean exterior with a heart of gold, of course.)

The plot launches when Jenna discovers she is pregnant with Earl's baby and promptly falls for the new doc in town, a goofy performance by Nathan Fillion -- I would watch that man in anything, so that's okay. (Nathan Fillion is on my Marital Top 5, if you know what I mean, and he was formerly the very irresistible space cowboy captain I've mentioned before in Rebel Reviews: Firefly/Serenity.)

Waitress is a feel-good treasure of a movie, right up there with southern dramedy classics, Fried Green Tomatoes and Steel Magnolias. This movie is a legacy for Adrienne Shelly's husband and baby daughter. Her death is an incomprehensible loss for all of us.