Waitress, there’s Seven Brides for Seven Brothers in my Soup!

In a break from tradition, I went through a loooong period of absolutely no movie watching over the past several weeks, which meant that Waitress, which got watched at the tail end of July, went unpartnered for mashing until I ended up in Atlanta, GA. While there, I saw Seven Brides for Seven Brothers. Naturally.

Despite almost eight weeks between them, and the fact that one movie was far better than the other, these two films have a surprising store of commonality. Both are principally concerned with the fantasies and realities of marriage, and both feature plucky heroines who are determined to better their own lives even if it means choosing unconventional options. Also, both use babies as deux ex machina. I do not know what the plural of deux ex machina is. Deal with it.

Okay. Waitress. Billed as a comedy, this movie is most decidedly not one. It is neither particularly funny, nor is any one in it especially happy. Basically, unhappily married Waitress (that chick from Felicity) finds out she’s preggers by her redneck, abusive, controlling husband. She realizes becoming a mother will pretty much lock her into a life of drudgery and pain with her douchebag husband, so she reacts by starting an affair with her doctor and also by baking magically delicious pies.

A word about the pies. Everything in this movie, from the previews to the opening credits to the characters’ comments make plain that Felicity has a rare gift for pie-making. Apparently, her pies are supernaturally good – they can make devils weep and tides stop. This magical pie-bility has NO BEARING on the plot. This violates one of the cardinal rules of storytelling, a.k.a. Chekhov’s Gun. To paraphrase, a pie on the table in the first act must be eaten by the third act. The collary to that is a magical pie on the table in the first act must PERFORM some freakin’ magic by the third act. The pies in this movie do not.

Back to the plot. The movie drifts along for the duration of Felicity’s unwilling, unwanted pregnancy, showing her few half-assed attempts to break free from her marriage and her increasingly odd affair with her (married) doctor. Also, Andy Griffith runs around with Odin’s ravens all but perched on his bony shoulder.

A sense of claustrophobia sets in, since we only see three sets for the whole film (Felicity’s work, her home, and her doctor’s office). At one point, she tries to sneak out of town in order to win a pie contest in the big city (plot development! Forcing the story!) – but then her husband catches her while she’s waiting at the bus stop and the whole element of her magical pie-making drops out entirely from the story.

Felicity gets all the way into the delivery room, still unhappily married and preggers, before Hollywood works its mojo. As soon as she sees her baby, she is CHANGED! Oh, the love! Oh, the strength! Oh, the power that lets her -- a flat-broke new mother -- simultaneously demand a divorce from her husband, end the affair with her doctor, and also decide to go into business for herself as a piemaker. The arrival of her daughter is treated as a gift from heaven in all the hackneyed, unrealistic ways you can conceive. Her daughter never cries, never shouts, never looks upset. In no way does being a single mother in the American South present any difficulties for Felicity. No, everything is hunky-dory from the second she held her unwanted baby in her arms, transformed by the power of love.

Felicity does open a pie shop, by the way. But not because she worked and sweated or got a loan specifically aimed at women entrepreneurs. Oh, no. She received a check from the doomed Andy Griffith (he of Odin’s ravens). See, he died the day Felicity’s daughter was born, and he bestowed a very generous gift on the one waitress who was consistently kind to him. In other words, Felicity was able to follow her dreams because of the gift from a man. Not exactly a blow for women’s lib.

On to Seven Brides for Seven Brothers. This movie was made in 1948, but I only became interested in it after learning it was based on the Roman myth of the 'Rape of Sabine Women' (which the movie totally acknowledges and works into a musical number). 7B47B has, as I said, many of the same themes as Waitress, the myths and realities of marriage being the most obvious.

In this story, a backwoodsman called Adam decides he needs a wife to take care of him, as well as to keep house for his six brothers. And since this is a musical, he sings his way into town and into the heart of a kick-ass pioneer woman known as Millie. Except that he doesn’t tell her she’ll be babysitting a bevy of backwoodsmen until she’s already signed on.

Now, if this were Waitress, Millie would just endure her existence and perhaps bake a pie or two. Millie ain’t no waitress, however, and she’s got a superpower way tougher than pie-bakin’. She can sing. Millie uses the power of song and 1940’s choreography to whip Adam and his brothers into shape, metaphorically whittling them into men any musical miss would want to date. And they soon find their prospective brides at barn-raising dance – which entails a dance-off with the prospectives’ current boyfriends, natch.

Things develop from there. Oh, it’s glorious, in all the ways that Waitress was not. Characters seize their emotions and act on them, consequences be damned. Feeling blue? Why not express your frustration with a soulful ditty accented by axes for dance props? Of course!

Eventually, the Rape of Sabine Women bit of the tale kicks in, and the sheer ridiculousness of the enterprise makes it wonderful. So clichéd, yet so weird that you can’t take your eyes off it. It’s here, too, that the real difference between the musical-movie world and waitress-world becomes obvious. Everyone in 7B47B is a generally goodhearted person who wants to make others happy and feels an obligation to do the right thing. The people in Waitress don’t. While they aren’t evil, per se, they are the proverbial good men who allow evil to flourish, which is perhaps what makes them so disappointing. Sure, Waitress ostensibly takes place in the real world, unlike 7B47B. But that begs the question of why a “real world” movie relies so heavily on the pure fantasy of motherhood as a cure to all ills.

The bottom line is actually this. 7B47B is just a better movie. There, I said it. While both films claim to be comedies with a certain amount of magic (music, pies), only one can back up its claims. 1948, here I come.