Local pie queen bakes herself a whole heap of little metaphors

Poignant, Waitress undeniably is. A fuzzy, warmer-than-life romantic comedy, it ends with its beleaguered heroine finding happiness and independence in her kitchen, as the credits roll to a cheerful lullaby: "Baby don't you cry/ Gonna make you a pie/ With a heart in the middle". What makes Waitress affecting in a way it wouldn't otherwise have been is that it appeared posthumously. It premiered at the Sundance Festival in January, three months after its writer-director, Adrienne Shelly, was murdered in her New York office after an argument with a construction worker.

Never was there a more startling disjunction between the manner of a director's death and the tenor of her work. No doubt a great deal of horrified sympathy, and sentiment, went towards making Waitress a hit when released in the US in May.

You may remember Shelly as a big-eyed, lippy ingenue in Hal Hartley's first two features, The Unbelievable Truth (1989) and Trust (1990), which more or less established the 1990s American template for left-field independent small-town comedies. More recently, Shelly had put her energies into going it alone as a director: Waitress is her third feature, though the only one to achieve prominence.

It would be wonderful to report that Waitress was an inspiring memorial, but the fact is that it's a icky, flimsy, oversugared confection, Oprah-style affirmative romcom at its most pudding- like. In one scene, heroine Jenna (Keri Russell), a diner waitress in the Deep South, presents her doctor with one of the pies she bakes so lovingly - a pink-and-white mound of marshmallow fluff. There's your metaphor right there, although I'm sure that Shelly saw her film simply as a dessert baked by hand, con amore.

The local pie queen, Jenna puts all her love between layers of pastry, because there sure ain't none between her and husband Earl (Jeremy Sisto), an oversexed, underbrained brute who won't even let her attend the Big Pie Bake over in Jonesville. Becoming pregnant, Jenna falls for new gynaecologist in town, charming, square-jawed Dr Pomatter (Nathan Fillion), a name so whimsical they should have named a pie after him right there: Pomatter Pie.

Meanwhile, life goes on at Joe's Diner. The waitresses, mousy Dawn (Shelly herself) and worldly-wise Becky (Cheryl Hines), are there to share breezy did-you-ever chat; cranky old Joe (ancient American TV fixture Andy Griffith) dispenses peppery wisdom from behind the pages of the Picayune; and Jenna continues to pour her feelings into daily specialities that express what's in her heart that moment: Kick in the Pants Pie, Lonely Chicago Pie, Pregnant Miserable Self-Pitying Loser Pie.

Whenever Jenna has a moment alone, the camera closes in on her work surface to show her pouring viscous glop - brown, red, pink, avocado green - into pastry shells. In one close-up, she lovingly cradles two handfuls of chocolate chips: she might as well have been holding a fat-engorged human heart right there.

The pregnant Jenna's ill-advised running gag is to exit scenes on the line, "I'm just going to throw up." But in all fairness, Keri Russell is one of the less emetic things about the film: cutesy in places but passably hardbitten. With an odd 1940s solidity to her no- nonsense, heart-shaped face, her speciality is the grouchy frown of a constipated angel; Shelly overworks that look, but more or less acknowledges that she's doing it in a comic montage in which Jenna's what-the-heck frown turns shot by shot into a lovestruck beam.

The exchanges have a stiff ring of stage farce, but between the acting and the editing, Shelly musters a brisk screwball rhythm. Shelly herself is likeable as gawky, gauche Dawn, but you can't help feeling she's fishing for compliments: a pair of comedy spectacles and constant references to bad skin can't disguise her cartoonish beauty. And if you like Cheryl Hines as Larry David's screen wife in Curb Your Enthusiasm, you'll enjoy her showcase moment, ecstatically flashing her teeth as she enthuses about the joys of hanky-panky on the side.

But the odd flavoursome dash of seasoning can't disguise Waitress's total lack of roughage. America traditionally loves down- home life-affirming movies set in diners, those microcosms of the mythical good-neighbourly society: Fried Green Tomatoes and the mercifully forgotten Sundance hit, Care of the Spitfire Grill, spring to mind. But no wonder Pulp Fiction made such an impact: the prospect of being shot by hipster hoods in a diner must have looked like a healthier alternative to seizing up with a coronary from those goddamned glutinous pies.

Further viewing Hal Hartley's 'The Unbelievable Truth' (C'est la vie DVD)

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