June 18, 2007
waitress and knocked up
"The film also deserves credit for showing a young, unwed mother taking responsibility for her actions, rather than opting for the easy abortion route." This quotation is timeless, in its way; in this case it's three years old, from a review of Saved! that appeared in the Catholic News Service.
Saved! is perhaps the most influential comedy in American cinema...this Spring (especially if you're watching the new DVD release of Weeds Season 2, wherein Saved!'s adult romance between Mary-Louise Parker and Martin Donovan, as mom Lilian and Pastor Skip, returns in the form of mom Nancy and DEA Agent Peter). Both this season's hegemonic Hollywood comedy, and its little indie that could, revolve around the same core plot point; apparently the Non-Sequel/Franchise market is committed to the drama of the implausibly pregnant young woman facing down a complicated and morally ambiguous choice.
As you will know by now, that choice isn't whether to keep the baby. As in Saved! (and many others; this seems to convenient analogue for particular reasons), the abortion option is thought about only far enough so that it can be shown to be unthinkable even in secular terms. To this point, Waitress and Knocked Up are roughly identical films.
Of course, they go different directions: in Waitress, the protag keeps the baby but ditches both husband and lover; in Knocked Up, the woman is not really the protag and thus, by definition, keeps the baby and the father. It would be nice — or interesting — if this gave the movies meaningfully different valences, but it doesn't; they both finally read as sentimental moralizing.
However, at least a couple distinctions can be drawn, the most obvious of which is that, non-stop for the first 70 minutes and intermittently after, Knocked Up is really freakin' funny. Waitress, conversely, is only very intermittently funny (largely thanks to the diner's's Flo, Cheyl Hines, late of the Larry David Show), and goes instead for a sweetness which is now wounded, now cloying. This might be by way of noting that one is a big studio machine, one a tiny Sundancer (relatively speaking).
And this indeed the difference that counts, in every possible way. One might enjoy how Waitress, more free to defy phantasmatic heartland test audiences, allows its hero to go her own way rather than re-coupling up per Hollywood protocols. But that would way overplay the film's independence of thought: it ends with the most grating affirmation of "core values" imaginable, insisting that the mystical bond between mother and child is absolute, transcendental, beyond human will or desire or freedom. Not only is this demonstrably not true, it's every bit as theological as any ending you could imagine; it certainly doesn't curtsy any less to the grinning idiocy of Christian values than does Knocked Up or, for that matter, than does The Greatest Story Ever Told.
And that, finally, is what sucks. Proffered as an "independent" and even propositionally hip and eccentric film, it forwards the most conservative, essentializing, and traditional message conceivable. Knocked Up, we suggest, is all the good parts of Saved!: well-written, well-framed, charming, with an appealing supporting cast. Waitress is just Saved!'s "Pastor Skip," brought in to retrench the community's core values and indeed revivify them, turning backflips and speaking in excruciating hip-hop patois to better convince his Fundie flock that the moralizing message is still relevant and even cool.
Given its circumstances, this is a movie that should have been impossible to hate.
18) Smokin' Aces (nothing)
17) Factory Girl (wasn't Smokin' Aces)
16) Paris je t'aime (didn't have Hayden Christenson)
15) Waitress (Cheryl Hines' micromonologues, Nathan Fillion's smile)
14) Dreamgirls (the club sets; Eddie Murphy's Marvin Gaye skullcap)
13) Avenue Montaigne (the one brief image of the young Dani)
12) Notes on a Scandal (Bill Nighy dancing)
11) Blades of Glory (ambient Ferrellage)
10) Disturbia (strange racialized decision to have best friend recreate the standard John Cho performance)
9) Alpha Dog (Justin Timberlake in general)
8) Shooter (Mark Wahlberg dressed as a frickin' yeti for the final showdown; Ned Beatty's career-long conversion into Buford T. Justice)
7) Backstage (Isild LeBesco's facial physiognomy; plausibility of such drecky pop being huge in France)
6) Grindhouse (Fake trailers, muscle cars, and a wrecker named Killdozer)
5) Knocked Up (Seth Rogen's delivery, the jokes about Martin's beard, Paul Rudd's three smiles)
4) 28 Weeks Later (Goodbye Dover Beach...)
3) The Host (brief familial hallucination of feeding the lost child; Kang-ho Song's facial expressions)
2) Children of Men (blood on the lens for long tracking shot; Clive Owen's slumped shoulders)
1) Pan's Labyrinth (Spanish Winona Ryder; Harold & the Purple Crayon riff; title better in English)