January Magazine Movie Moods/ A Bitter Sweet Temptation
01/07/2008 04:12 PM by Gretchen Schauffler
A New Year Resolution is the dessert of the holiday season served at the end of your Christmas buffet. Christmas has become the “Last Supper” of the marketing world for diet products, programs and exercise clubs. Every year you see diet commercials, half-their-size magazine covers, and listen-to-this-story morning shows that focus on weight loss triumphs to remind everyone that a new year and a new life is just around the corner.
A diet seems easy in comparison to getting a new life, especially one that does not look or feel like yours. Just ask Jenna, a woman who scoops, rolls and bakes her frustrations away through colorful and delicious pies with names such as “I-Don’t-Want-Earl’s-Baby Pie”, and “Falling-in-Love Pie”. The movie Waitress, a sweet and funny “dramady”, leads you down the psychological and moral escape routes that Jenna and her waitress friends take in order to cope with a reality they feel is not theirs.
It is delivered to us as if we are in giant nursery room where color is used in its most simple form to show us what their lives are all about—blue for boys, pink for girls. The color blue is in the driver seat for most of the film—literally a constant reminder that it is a man’s world according to these waitress’s lives. Jenna is covered and smothered in blue and surrounded by strong earthy browns that make the introduction of any other color impossible—like the thought of any new possibility in her life. Only the things she can control, her pies, get to be what ever colors she wants.
The only way these women can meet their unspoken and unfulfilled life expectations is through secrets, affairs and pies. It gets more and more suffocating as Jenna finds out at the beginning of the movie she is pregnant by her husband Earl, her emotional and abusive warden. The bigger she gets every month, the faster her death sentence seems to be approaching. At the end you expect her to make an “I-am-dead pie” from heaven. But instead, it is through giving new life that Jenna discovers that it is just as much her world as it a mans world, because after all, there can be no man without a woman. Once she realizes this, check out how the colors from the pies spill out and paint a new picture of what life can be.
!
The movie is bitter sweet in more ways than one. Writer/director Adrienne Shelly was murdered shortly before its release. Thank God, she didn’t leave this world with out saying a thing or two in this film.
I hear mothers that say they got lucky with boys because girls are so difficult to raise. I wonder if what they mean by difficult is that they would have to teach their daughters about finding self-fulfillment, personal passions and goals, while going against a world that teaches you that happiness for women can only come through what men think or provide. I wonder if these women understand that by saying they got lucky with boys, they themselves perpetuate the perceived value of boys over girls. I wonder who made them think they didn’t have it in them to be a great female role model. It does not have to be a blue or pink world—there are so many colors to live with together. Adrienne Shelly dedicated the film to her 4-year-old daughter and I believe, to all of our daughters.
Gretchen Schauffler
Artist and Founder of Devine Color®
Distributor: Fox Searchlight
Cast: Keri Russell, Nathan Fillion, Cheryl Hines, Adrienne Shelly, Jeremy Sisto & Andy Griffith Director/Screenwriter: Adrienne Shelly
Producer: Michael Roiff
Genre: Drama / Romance / Comedy
Rating: PG13
Running time: 104 min.
| Textile Help | ||
December Magazine Movie Moods/ Everyone has a Christmas Story!
February Magazine Movie Moods/Coverfield: No Monster regret
Back to Devine Blog
I finished reading your thoughts, whispered WOW
with tears in my eyes
I saw the film and liked it even more after reading this
Thank you
— no name please 01/08/2008 01:10 PM #