Pie-making is a tricky business, as are most other things in life. In "Waitress," pie-maker (or rather, pie-genuis as she's known to her friends) and waitress Jenna's habitual reply to "How are you doing today?" is a rolling of the eyes and a quiet, heartfelt, "Same old shipwreck."
Jenna (Keri Russell) is attractive, a superb cook and scintillatingly smart, but her personal life is an ongoing nightmare due to her infantile, abusive husband, Earl (Jeremy Sisto), who routinely snatches her weekly wages right out of her hand.
The women around her also find life hard to navigate; fellow waitress Becky (Cheryl Hines) is stuck with a much-older, bed-ridden husband, and Dawn (director Adrienne Shelly, starring in her own movie) is desperately single, so much that she has invented the Five-Minute Blind Date — "I go home after five minutes and then I wouldn't have wasted the whole evening!" Old Joe (Andy Griffiths), the man who owns their place of employment, Joe's Pie Diner, is your standard demanding and cantankerous fool who shows up every day to fuss over the menu and launch into mind-boggling monologues of endless complaining, adding further misery on the girls' lives. Men!