Waitress (2007)

3 months ago

Waitress (2007)

by Elizabeth Grant Thomas

When a friend of mine, a fellow new mother, started a blog about “making pies and raising Baby,” I asked her if she had seen the film Waitress. When she said she hadn’t, I gushed: “Oh, you have to! It’s about this woman who finds out she’s pregnant, and she doesn’t want to be, and all she wants to do is make pies, and so it’s all about pies and babies, but it’s so much more than that.”

I’m not sure if my terrible plot summary convinced her to see the film, but my fervor was genuine. Waitress tells the story of Jenna (Keri Russell), a poor waitress in a mythical Southern town who is married to the abusively controlling Earl (played memorably by Jeremy Sisto). She finds peace in baking pies, a skill she inherited from her now-deceased mother. In the clutches of a hard, sad life, she finds solace in creating a new pie each day for Joe’s Pie Diner, where she works as a waitress. The pies—the movie’s mouthwatering centerpiece—are named to reflect Jenna’s mood: “I Hate My Husband Pie,” “Naughty Pumpkin Pie,” “Baby Screamin’ Its Head Off in the Middle of the Night and Ruinin’ My Life Pie.” Jenna hopes to win a pie contest and use the prize money to escape the oppressive hand of Earl, but when she finds out she is pregnant, all hope of escape seems lost. But it’s so much more than that.

The first time I saw the film I was recently married, with thoughts of motherhood far from my mind. But as I sat in a darkened theatre with fat, hot tears rolling down my cheek, I couldn’t help but feel an affinity with Jenna. I had also lost my mother—the woman who instilled a lifelong love of baking—five years earlier; some of the film’s most touching scenes revolve around how Jenna uses baking to feel a connection to her mother. In fact, some of her happiest moments in the film come when she is making pies and reminiscing about her mother, fissures of light breaking through the darkness. Her memories of her mother, which bubble to the surface as she expertly rolls pie dough and slowly spoons filling into the crust, give you an indication that she was once a happier person. We have the sense that Jenna never would have settled for someone like Earl had her mother been around. Like Jenna’s, my own mother was my compass, that person who validated my existence and reminded me that I mattered, and seeing this relationship played out on film always hits me hard.

Jenna’s own leap into motherhood provides us with the film’s second focus. So many films portray the foray into motherhood as either an exciting romp or something to be avoided altogether. Waitress’ treatment of the subject is more nuanced and complex, much like the real-life experience. Watching this film now, as the mother of a 16-month-old, I relate differently to Jenna, who describes herself as “not like the other moms-to-be.” In the opening scene Jenna is surrounded by her two best friends as they wait for the results of an at-home pregnancy test. “I just want to bake pies,” she says and, when the ubiquitous two pink lines appear, she immediately dreams up “Bad Baby Pie.”

Even mothers of the most wanted babies feel that tension between shedding pieces of their old life to make way for their new one, which often seems like a mini-death that can only be mourned privately, as social conventions expect nothing but celebration. I vividly remember strolling my three-week-old baby around a park one afternoon in the midst of a particularly bad day, sobbing, thinking, “What have I done?” As soon as the thought formed in my mind I felt an intense need to push it to the side, knowing it wasn’t what I was “supposed” to be thinking. Jenna is a mouthpiece for so many women who don’t find themselves fitting the conventional standards of motherhood, which often vary drastically from the actual lived experience.

It is never a question for Jenna whether or not she will keep the baby, but her feelings about motherhood are raw and honest. When her doctor (Nathan Fillion) congratulates her on her pregnancy she emphasizes that, while she plans to keep the baby, she doesn’t “want” it. “I’m having the baby and that’s that. It’s not a party,” she says, with her unusual candor. As the months progress she never manages to feel connected to the life that is growing inside of her; it is “an alien and a parasite” that has robbed her of any chance of freedom and escape from her lonely life. Her friends buy her a book, What a Mama You’re Going to Be, to record her memories of her pregnancy, for which she can muster little enthusiasm.

Not everyone wants to be a mama – that don’t make me a bad person…I respect this baby’s right to thrive…but no, I feel nothing like affection. Maybe that man smothered all the affection out of me.

One of the “exercises” in the book involves writing a letter to her unborn baby, and Jenna’s letter provides a window into her specific resistance to motherhood. She tells the baby, “Many of the things that happen are not worth living through…I frankly don’t know what I got to give you.” Having children is the ultimate act of faith, a vote of confidence for life and humanity, and the permanence can be terrifying.

For years I was unsure if I wanted children; I didn’t feel like “the mothering type,” and without the guiding hand of my own mother I simply wasn’t sure if I was up to the task. Jenna’s fears about motherhood are essentially rooted in being uncertain that she can provide adequately – not just financially, but emotionally – for her baby, a feeling that all mothers can relate to. Even now, doubts about whether I am “enough” slice me to my core. But Jenna’s salvation is the strength of the relationship she shared with her own mother; that guiding hand, though invisible, is still there.

Just before Jenna gives birth, Earl discovers the money she’s been hiding to execute her escape from him. When he demands to know its purpose, she lies, saying she was saving it up for the baby. “Your crib was bought with the money that was supposed to buy me a new life,” she silently tells her baby. For this woman, who wants nothing more than to make pies, there is such deep-seated resentment towards a baby who robs her of the life she dreams of. With the money gone all hope of a new life seems lost.

And then she gives birth, and everything changes.

There is a gripping moment toward the end of the film, in the final stages of her labor, when she cries, “I don’t want no baby, Earl!” The baby is delivered and a faraway look transfixes her, as if she’s completely disassociated from the experience. Then, with a self-possession in her voice that we haven’t heard up until this point, she tells the nurse, “Give her to me.” In the instant that Jenna becomes a mother we feel a shift, her doubts and uncertainties crumbling away. A dam bursts, and whatever kept her in an abusive marriage washes away in the flood. Confidently, she tells Earl, “I want a divorce.”

Birth and death are two sides of the same coin, life-changing circumstances that have enormous potential to be clarifying and galvanizing. Every birth – whether literal or metaphorical – requires something else to die, even something as simple as “the way things used to be.” And every death, no matter how painful, clears the way for something new to be born. While Jenna spends most of the film believing that this baby will rob of her of a new life, in the end it ends up restoring her life. As is so often the case, we find the answers when we stop incessantly searching for them. Jenna’s ultimate freedom as a human being comes, paradoxically, through her genuine and fierce attachment to her daughter.

Like life itself, Waitress is a film filled with both incredible beauty and sadness. There is so much more I could say about the terrific supporting cast, the smart and witty script, and the sheer visual prettiness of the film. But for me, this is primarily a film not just about motherhood but personhood. It’s about what happens when we stop running and let ourselves by transformed by the circumstances of our lives. It’s about finding real love and attachment in what can often be a sad and lonely world. It’s about inviting light and beauty into even the darkest corners of our existence.

As Jenna says, “Life does funny kinds of things sometimes.”

Elizabeth Grant Thomas is a freelance writer who lives in Albuquerque, New Mexico, where she writes regularly for Edible Santa Fe. She blogs about life and motherhood at her site, elizabethgrantthomas.com.