A case for contraceptives pie.

Waitress. This is a film that yanks on your heartstrings. If your heartstrings are easily persuaded by pie creation fantasies emboldened by piano-heavy musical interludes. While it worked in Das Boot, it falls flat here.

We open with an overhead shot of pie after pie after pie after pie after pie being created. We see bananas, we see berries, we see custard, we see crusts. And we see credits. While I'm sure preparing a pie has its virtues, sitting through these credits was boring. When the action begins in earnest, we are further disappointed as we realize we have mistakenly begun watching an adaptation of Steel Magnolias.

The protagonist, Jenna, works in a dinner that serves pies. Her only friends are her two fellow waitresses. They also serve pies. But Jenna makes the best pies. She also makes babies, it turns out. However, there's twist!

The twist is that her husband, Earl, is abusive. He drives up, honks his horn, hits her, and demands that she "make him feel like a man." Making him feel like a man is Southern, I presume, for making her have sex with him. And bake him pies.

So here she is. Doesn't like her husband much. Dreams about baking pies. She's pregnant. And she's utterly miserable. Like Sarah Palin, she decides that though she doesn't want the child, she'll have it anyway. Hey, things could be worse. She could be unwed.

Predictably enough she goes to see her doctor. To make a tediously long story short, she kisses him abruptly and then they have a lot of sex in his office during her check-ups. It's a classic romance in too many ways to count.

Meanwhile, one of her waitress friends marries a stalker named for the state of Oklahoma, the other neglects her invalid husband and starts banging the fry cook. None of this really makes sense, but we go along with it because we're enthralled by the voice over letters to the unborn child. And the pie preparation fantasies. Sort of like the Requiem for a Dream sequences in which they shoot up, except with pies.

Like an artist, Jenna mines her innermost emotions to develop pastries that knock the socks off her diner patrons. Heartbreak pie, I'm doing my gynecologist pie, lonely pie, and -- occasionally -- Chicken Soup for the Waitress' Soul pie.

I hardly have the energy to go on. Jenna then befriends the owner of the diner, a hilarious old man who does hilarious things like pretend to read her horoscope while actually just giving her advice about her predicament. Everyone says he's a mean, obstinate man with a heart of pure coal but we soon realize he's a teddy bear. We'll call him Miss Daisy, for short.

Anyway, she continues the affair with the doctor, then gives birth, then falls in love with the child she despised, then dumps her abusive husband, then finds out that Miss Daisy has conveniently died and left her several hundred thousand dollars, then dumps the doctor. Anyway, none of that really matters -- at least it didn't to me.

Then we see she and her daughter, Lulu, in yellow dresses walking away from the pie shop they built with love, determination, and $200,000 of Miss Daisy's money. Everything turns out real great. Except that instead of feeling satisfied, you feel as though you've been robbed of your time. And perhaps contemplate the similarity between the words pie and die.