Pie in the Sky, Pie in the Face, Pie à la Misandry: What I Learned from Watching Waitress

1. It's perfectly fine to cheat on your husband instead of divorcing him as long as you're an otherwise nice, attractive young woman, and he's abusive or an invalid.
2. It's also a good idea to marry the dweeby stalker with whom you had one date and who keeps frequenting the café where you work, breaks out into really bad spontaneous verse, won't take no for an answer, and your best friends think he's creepy--as long as you think that no one else will have you.
3. Professional northern actresses can afford to lose and regain their southern accents throughout a chick flick because they're so much cooler and inspire so much more sympathy than the abusive, stupid, mean, grouchy, and/or clueless male characters.
4. If you waitress in a café that specializes in homemade pies, you'll stay thin.
5. If you live in the rural Deep South, there is reliable public transportation that will get you to and from work, and even to your OB-GYN with whom you can get an appointment at a moment's notice even if you are not yet sleeping with him, but the damned bus will not show up in time to help you run away from your abusive husband.
6. If you are an abused wife and are saving up money to escape, you should definitely leave it all over the house so that your badass husband can find it, instead of in a secret savings account.
7. If a movie has any comedic elements whatsoever, it's okay for the main character to put up with her husband's physical abuse and pathological demands--"grin and bear it," as it were--until the penultimate scene.
8. If you're nice to the cranky old man who owns the café where you somehow have time to bake twenty-seven varieties of pies in addition to waiting tables, he will leave you a quarter of a million dollars before conveniently slipping into a coma in the same hospital where you are about to give birth, which will enable you to leave your abusive husband.
9. But first, you have to give birth to that baby, whom you didn't want in the first place. Never mind that abortion is still legal even in the Deep South; once you become a mother, this will empower you to do without men altogether and instead form an unhealthy, pie-baking bond with the baby daughter with whom you of course fell head over heels in love as soon as you saw her sweet little face.
10. Once you finally give your abusive husband the boot--right in the delivery room, of course--it is ethical for the hospital in which you just gave birth to boot you out in the middle of the night because your husband, who had to be restrained and physically removed from the delivery room before he killed you and your newborn, refuses to pay for the two- or three-day stay that the AMA rules as necessary to monitor new mothers' and infants' well-being.
11. It is possible to sever ties on your way out of the hospital with the sexy married OB-GYN with whom you'd been sleeping without any negative repercussions, because the doctor, who is married to a smokin' hot redhead who just so happens to also be a doctor at the hospital (and Dr. Wifey even shows up in the delivery room while you are in labor--what a laff riot!) is essentially a spineless little worm and just can't argue with your newfound moral superiority.
12. It also shows how righteous your priorities are if you change the name of the café to reflect the name of your baby daughter instead of keeping it the same in honor of the old poop-head café owner who just gave you all that money.
13. You can definitely bake pies happily ever after in that nice little southern town without ever having to fear that your psycho ex-husband will show up at the café, or at your new home, with a sawed-off shotgun.

(I am well aware that writer/director Adrienne Shelly, who also played the quirky waitress who wound up with the geeky poetry stalker, was brutally murdered just after this film was accepted at Sundance; she was talented, only forty years old, and left behind a grieving family--including a little daughter who appears in the last scene of Waitress. I mean no disrespect to Ms. Shelly, but I think this is a very bad, unfunny movie with disturbing, even alarming messages about both men and women.)