Waitress

Against the suggestion of my readership, I forewent seeing Ocean’s Thirteen this weekend so that I could watch Keri Russell in Waitress. While it wasn’t the spectacle that the other movie’s on my summer list are, Waitress is a unique movie that has a little bit of everything (except maybe action).

As can be imagined, the movie is really all about Keri Russell and her performance. For those who don’t know (or can’t remember) who Keri Russell is, she’s probably most well known for her stint on four years of Felicity, a fledgling show by now-superstar J.J. Abrams.

Keri shines in the movie, ranging from extreme sadness, to anger, to pure glee. At times it seems that she is channeling Natalie Portman from such films as Garden State and Where the Heart Is. Coming from me, being compared to Natalie Portman is high praise indeed.

Supporting Keri most prominently in the movie is Andy Griffith. It’s taken a few decades for his small-town sheriff role to wear off, but there’s no hint of it in this movie. Although his character is relatively minor to the plot, his performance brings a ton to the movie, upstaging most of the younger actors around him.

Jeremy Sisto plays Keri Russell’s neurotic husband (aptly named Earl), and he’s extremely easy to hate. This seems to be a natural trait of Jeremy Sisto. I hope I never meet him, because I may have a hard time not hating him in person as well.

I wouldn’t be much of a closet Browncoat if I didn’t give a nod to Nathan Fillion. Although I love the man and what he did with Captain Malcolm Reynolds in Firefly, his character in this movie was a bit boring and lacked the polish that the rest of the actors brought to the screen.

All in all, Waitress is an endearing movie that can’t squarely be fit into a genre. It’s a strange movie about twisted lives that aren’t as different from our own as we’d probably like. There’s no special effects to wow you at the theater, but what it lacks in bang it makes up for with heart.

Verdict: A