NORMA RAE, Scarlett O'Hara and, maybe, Joan of Arc (if she were from the south of France) can step aside. A new character has joined the ranks of the feisty, heroic, yet deceptively sweet Southern heroine.
She is Jenna, the "pie genius" at Joe's Pie Diner somewhere in the rural South.
She has an abusive husband, no money and is pregnant, but don't count her out. Even if you think you're levelheaded and immune to this kind of movie, she's going to steal your heart in a miraculously balanced new movie called "Waitress."
That balance is between sentimentality and plausibility.
Just about everything about "Waitress" is predictable in a feel-good way, but it maintains a sensible, no-nonsense manner that will allow even truck-driving macho men to snuggle up to it without being embarrassed.
On the inside, Jenna (Keri Russell, from TV's "Felicity") is a pistol even as she plays the sweet, helpless victim. Southern women are like that - at least the Southern women of myth and legend, like the gals from "Designing Women" on TV.
Her husband, Earl (Jeremy Sisto), is a real jerk. He takes her paycheck before it's cashed. He wants sex regularly - along with a hot meal and no back talk.
She'd leave him if only she had the menas. The prize money from a pie-baking contest seems to be her only chance, but he's not about to let her enter.
Neither is happy when Jenna learns she is pregnant.
Earl demands that she not love the baby more than him. She names one of her new pies the "I Don't Want Earl's Baby Pie." She calls another the "Baby Screaming Its Head Off in the Middle of the Night and Ruining My Life Pie.
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The townspeople come from far and wide to sample the delicious concoctions. The diner's cantankerous owner, Joe, is played by none other than Andy Griffith - the same Andy Griffith who lives just to the south of us in Manteo, N.C.
This is the part that lured him back into the movies, and wouldn't it be a topper to a warm career if he got an Oscar nomination out of it? A few more scenes and he'd be a sure bet. As it is, there's a possibility.
Russell carries the movie. We know Jenna's inner thoughts, while the rest of the town sees her as just the hard-working waitress who has to put up with Earl. This minimum-wage comedy-drama is nicely filled out by her sisters in the work place - the outspoken Becky (Cheryl Hines) and the dim and mousy Dawn (played by the film's late director and writer, Adrienne Shelly).
The waitress triangle has a close kinship to the classic "Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore," which was shown locally a few months ago when its Oscar-winning star, Ellen Burstyn, was in town to receive the first Lifetime Achievement Award presented by Old Dominion University and the city of Norfolk. Waitresses yearn to serve a buffet to a world that is starving to death.
Jenna may be an innocent, but an instant attraction surfaces when she meets her baby doctor (Nathan Fillion).
Part hunk, part doofus, he's as hesitant and insecure as Jenna. He's married, too, but that doesn't stop them from lurching passionately at each other over, and on, the examination table. She's scared Earl will kill her if he finds out.
Still, the audience pulls for them, in spite of the two marriages involved.
Scene-stealing support is added by the hilarious Eddie Jemison as Ogie, a poem-spouting tax accountant who falls hard for Dawn. His poems are terrible, and his demeanor is similar to the aw-shucks quality of a Pee-wee Herman.
"Waitress" could become a likable, long-running hit in the same way as last year's "Little Miss Sunshine." Its success, though, is tempered by the fact that Shelly, its director, writer and co-star, was murdered in her New York apartment last November. A construction worker with whom she had an argument has been held in connection with the case.
A low-budget, independent film, "Waitress" has the ability to sneak up on you. Jenna is one of those seemingly downtrodden women who clearly knows how to overcome obstacles. But every character, even the most minor, rings true.
• Reach Mal Vincent at (757) 446-2347 or mal.vincent@pilotonline. com.
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