a modern take on infidelity

This weekend I *finally* got around to watching Waitress, which is perhaps most well-known for being the indie film whose director/writer was murdered in her Greenwich Village apartment before the movie ever came out, and which Netflix sent me like a month ago. I'm not sure what exactly made me initially think I wanted to see this and what exactly made me leave it sitting on my kitchen table for four weeks, but be that as it may, now I'm gonna talk about it.

Here's a brief synopsis with spoilers. (If you think you're ever going to watch this movie and want to be surprised about what happens, don't read this, and if you do, don't come whining to me.) This movie is about a diner waitress in an unhappy, abusive marriage whose only joy is baking fanciful and delicious pies for herself and for the diner. She unexpectedly becomes pregnant which she is *not* happy about--one of her pies is called "I don't want to have Earl's baby pie"--particularly since it's screwing up her plans to take the money she's been saving behind her husband's back and secreting about the house and escape to a new life. She spontaneously begins a very inappropriate affair with her ob-gyn, who is also married. As her pregnancy continues, events conspire against her ever getting out, until the day her doctor/lover tells her to go outside his office and wait for him, and maybe they'll just take off together, but in any case they'll figure something out. While waiting for him, her water breaks. She goes to the hospital to deliver and the crotchy old rich guy who owns the diner (Andy Griffith! inspired casting!) who's in for surgery, stops by to give her a card. Meanwhile, she meets her ob/lover's wife who's a resident at the hospital. She delivers her daughter, takes one look at her and falls in love with her, and tells her husband unceremoniously to take a hike. The card from the old dude proves to have a nice big check in it so's she can start her own pie shop. She breaks it off with the doc, telling him she could see his wife loves and trusts him, and in montage lives happily ever after with her kiddo and her new business (with a little help from her diner friends.) The end.

Okay. I had some problems with the characterization of her husband. On the one hand, he's a whiny, needy, clingy sort--for instance, his first reaction to learning of her pregnancy is to worry she's gonna love the baby more than him (he's also very stupid, not to have twigged by that point that she hates his guts). On the other hand, he's an overtly controlling, abusive sort--takes her pay from her and won't let her have any money or a car, won't let her go anywhere, hits her (you *know* we get a scene of that, so that we sympathize with her infidelity.) Now I personally have know whiny, needy, clingy guys and I've know overtly abusive guys, but you don't usually see that all together in one package. He's portrayed such that you just know if she hit him back or just stood up to him and said, look, you act like that again and I'm never gonna love you, he'd just crumble. And in fact, more or less does, because when she leaves him in the end, he's not shown putting up any kind of real fight. So, to me, the whole premise of her being so afraid of him and unable to leave is bogus. His character is just written to be maximally unpleasant with every bad trait you've ever seen in a man wrapped up into one, and that's just stacking the deck, n'est pas?

Now, her lover/doctor? The only explanation for him falling head over heels for her and behaving in what is the most egregiously inappropriate manner--I mean, you just don't start making out with your patients, you just don't--is that she reminds him of some diner waitress he had a crush on when he was a kid. That's the sole reason for him risking his marriage and career. Oh, yeah, there's some bullshit about her making him feel peaceful and stuff, but that's only after they're immersed in it. When we meet his wife at the end of the movie, she's pretty and kind and competent. But he's perfectly willing to carry on the affair until Keri Russell tells him no more.

Are you starting to grasp what this movie is really about? Women are good; men are bad, or at least childish and unable to resist their whims without a woman to set them straight. It's okay to cheat if your husband is bad. It's not okay to cheat once you meet your lover's wife and find out she's a nice lady, because sisterhood comes before guys. (There's another example of this in the movie: Keri's friend, a forty-something waitress in the diner, is screwing around with their boss, the cranky short order cook/manager. She's married to a much older guy who is, at this point, "a drooling vegetable." Her friends chide her about the affair when they find out, because they know their boss's wife and she's a nice lady.) I find this take on marital unfaithfulness interesting and telling. Cheating isn't wrong, per se, it's only wrong if you're hurting someone who doesn't deserve to be hurt. And if you're a woman, it's especially wrong if you're hurting another woman. Because men come and go, but women need to stick together.

Societally, that's very new millennium, isn't it? In An Affair to Remember, you certainly don't see Deborah Kerr wasting any energy thinking about how devastated Cary Grant's fiance is gonna be when he dumps her.

xoxo