Browse Movies : 2007 : Romance : W

Adrienne Shelly's sunny final film is also her most artistically successful and intrinsically marketable directorial effort. An old-fashioned fairy tale that honors the transformative power of female friendship and motherhood, "Waitress" features a dynamic cast led by Keri Russell, whose character will surely do, in a Rachael Ray kind of way, for down home pie-making what the title character of "Babette's Feast" did for Cailles en Sarcophage.

When Russell's character Jenna, a waitress in a cheery southern diner, discovers that she's pregnant, she doesn't exactly jump for joy. Motherhood was never in her plans, and she's already saddled with her needy, jealous and infantile husband Earl (Jeremy Sisto).

At first, things seem hopeless and her dreams for a better life are in ruins, until a good-looking doctor (Nathan Fillion) arrives in town and mixes things up. With the support and love of her friends and co-workers (Adrienne Shelly and Cheryl Hines) at Joe's Pie Diner, Jenna exhibits her skills with crusts and fillings which are particularly appreciated by Joe himself (Andy Griffith). She then gains the courage to embrace independence and create the life of her dreams.

From the moment Zia (Patrick Fugit) cuts his wrists and enters a bizarre afterlife reserved for suicides, this film becomes a strangely uplifting, darkly comic tale about a journey through the hereafter. This is a world where everyone still bears the scars earned from the manner in which they "offed" while the everyday reality is a twisted mirror image of our own mortal world. When Zia begins his search for his long lost love, he encounters a variety of memorable individuals, be it a disillusioned suicide bomber or an angel in disguise. But it is in Eugene (Shea Whigham), an inscrutable Russian musician, and Mikal (Shannyn Sossamon), an accidental tourist, that he finds his closest friends. This trio of lost souls forms an uncommon bond as they set out on a journey across the afterlife in search of what they could not find in their previous lives.

A comedy that shows us that love has nothing to do with perfection. After losing the woman of his dreams, Anderson (Biggs) is convinced he'll never fall in love again. But at the urging of his best friend, he spontaneously proposes to a dissatisfied waitress named Katie (Fisher) and an innocent dare evolves into the kind of love that both have been looking for all along.