WAITRESS (2007) ** You know those movies made by men for men, where females are invariably skimpily clad airheads who define themselves solely by their ability to bring men pleasure, and so spend the entire film leaping about and bending over? This is the movies for women made by women, psychological variation of that. The message? All men are psychological cripples-you can either play down to their level or transcend it. Now while neither application is universal, I suppose that there is some foundation for each, and so the challenge is which way they decide to take this one. There are times that it seems possible that they will make a go of it, take it into the realm of those meaningful films about the solitary, imperfect individual overcoming a difficult situation. This approach is not helped by the fact that they start by landing us in an unhealthy relationship where the guy is clearly acting like an asshole (which everyone incessantly points out), but his saintly wife is lying to him about everything, has long since entirely given up on the relationship to the point of hiding exit money, and spends all of her time talking shit about him to her cannon fodder friends. Hmmm... And then, for a feminist tract, there is the matter that there's an off-screen wife getting cheated on without knowing it, but who is apparently all but irrelevant to the narrative. To be fair they do eventually get around to at least name-checking these matter s but when the big moment comes they opt for going the gritty romance novel route. It's difficult to take a gender challenge from that position seriously.
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