Spoiler Warning:  Although I tried to keep my review spoiler free, the discussion in this commentary will include plot points that could be considered spoilers.

One of the key topics in Waitress is love.  While it is important to the story, the film doesn’t treat it as the be-all and end-all of human life.  The film doesn’t so much show what love is as it shows what love is not.

First of all, love is not based on what feeds us.  Earl is Jenna’s abusive husband.  He has a couple very important lines that show the fallacy of this particular perversion of love.  The first comes as Jenna tells him of her desire to enter a pie contest (which would give her an opportunity to escape Earl’s abuse).  He doesn’t understand why she needs to do this, “when you have someone like me to take care of.”  It takes a beat or two before we realize that we expected him to add “you” to the end of that sentence.  Its absence speaks volumes about Earl’s understanding of their relationship.  Jenna is there to make Earl’s life better.  Jenna exists to make Earl happy in every way.

The other line is when Earl tells her, “You’re the only person I ever loved; you’re the only person that ever belonged to me.”  The contradiction that is central to that statement points to the possessiveness that some people tie to their idea of love.  Earl no doubt views his abuse as signs of his true love for Jenna.  In reality, it is selfishness that has no relation with love.

The corollary to this is that submissiveness is also not a matter of love, but of abnegation.

Another misunderstanding about love that is exposed in this film is that physical attraction and sex are the same thing as love.  Throughout Jenna and Dr. Pomatter’s affair, they seem to be helpless to deal with their attraction.  They have fallen madly in love with each other—and yet, they really have no love between them.  They have no relationship except sexual.  That alone is not enough for us to expect them to be able to find happiness.  There is a sense in which they both are operating out of the same sort of selfishness that leads Earl to abuse.

Rather, we learn about love as we watch Jenna teach Dr. Pomatter how to make a pie.  (This is a scene in which there is a tenderness that shows a possibility of love between them.)  She recalls her mother baking the same kind of inventive pies when Jenna was a child.  While she baked, she sang of making a pie with a heart in the middle—the idea that making something to share with another is the basis of love.  Jenna realized that the making of pies is where she found love, and knowing that she was truly loved set her heart free to love in new ways.

After having her baby and discovering someone she can love fully, Jenna ends up singing the same song as she holds her daughter in her arms while making her latest pies.