Sleeping with the fishes — Waiter’s twist mostly involves having the main character suffer

“So here’s the premise — bear with me, it’s a little out there. This guy, he could be an accountant or a waiter or something like that. His life is really standard. He works his crappy job, goes back to his crappy apartment, watches his crappy TV. Every once in awhile he even has crappy sex with his crappy girlfriend. Got it? OK, here comes the crazy part — he’s somehow found out that he’s a work of fiction. So he decides to find his writer, and he does, and weird stuff happens.”

Though the above might sound like a short story proposal from a first-year English student who just found out what the words postmodernism and metatextuality mean, it was also the basic plot of Marc Forster’s 2006 comedy, Stranger than Fiction, as well as the Dutch film Waiter, which was also originally made in 2006. Unsurprisingly, Waiter treads nearly identical territory and shares many of the flaws of its American counterpart. Unfortunately, it’s also lacking most of Stranger than Fiction’s charms.

The film follows Edgar (Alex van Wamerdam, who also wrote and directed the feature) through his day-to-day doldrums serving unappreciative customers in the nearly deserted restaurant he works at, while juggling the many women he is involved with. It’s all very unglamorous — a fact emphasized by the film’s universally dark lighting — and Edgar knows it, so he casually waltzes into the apartment of his writer, Herman (Mark Reitman), and demands a cheerier fictitious existence. This creates an ongoing argument between Herman, who wants to create a modern, flawed character, and Herman’s girlfriend, Suzie (Thekla Reuten), who wants to put Edgar through the ringer. The result of their feud is Edgar gets punched a lot.

While this kind of story requires a certain degree of suspension of disbelief from its audience, Waiter asks for too much and suffers from some debilitating conceptual flaws. As with Stranger than Fiction, what Herman writes lacks the necessary elements for it to be considered a story, such as plot and conflict. If audiences are supposed to buy dual narrative layers, they need to be given some reason to believe the author’s account of the lead character could exist without the metatextual awareness. In other words, for a story-within-a-story to work, there needs to be two stories, otherwise it’s just one bad narrative and a bunch of wasted time.

Though the Will Ferrell vehicle suffered from this problem, its strong performances and winsome humour were enough to keep it enjoyable. Waiter tries to pull off a similar coup with some absurdist comedy and thriller elements, but ends up as a confused and awkwardly handled mishmash of genres. This, coupled with the cast’s stoic, uninterested performances, makes Waiter a tedious, frustrating watch.