by Phillip Johnston
In 1998, Nora Ephron directed “You’ve Got Mail,” one of the first movies about Internet communication. Following in her own tradition, Ephron has now made “Julie & Julia” (out on DVD this Tuesday), perhaps the first movie about blogging and one that also happens to be about legendary chef Julia Child.
In 2002, Julie Powell (Amy Adams) lives in post-9/11 New York City with her husband, Eric, and spends her days in a cubicle answering phones for a government recovery agency. She’s on the verge of 30, her office hours are long, her closest friends are corporate jerks and the only relief from a hard day of work is the solace of her miniscule kitchen.
In need of a challenge, she picks up Julia Child’s “Mastering the Art of French Cooking” and decides (at first against her will) to cook her way through all 524 recipes in 365 days and blog about it all the way along.
In a story told simultaneously, an American woman named Julia Child (Meryl Streep) has just moved to post-World War II Paris with her husband Paul (Stanley Tucci) and refuses to conform to the French housewife mold of daily hat-making classes. Improbably tall at six feet, two inches, she doesn’t fit in easily either.
But her first meal in France is a revelation for her (the real Julia would later describe it as “an opening of soul and spirit”), prompting her doting husband to ask over dinner, “What is it that you really like to do?” Her reply: “Eat.”
This love of French food—a love not derived from pretense, but from intense gastronomical pleasure—prompts her to join a cooking class at Le Cordon Bleu cooking school, in which she is the only woman. Years after finding her niche in the kitchen, she’ll have the world’s top cooking show, a bestselling French cookbook, and she’ll teach Julie Powell and millions of others how to revel in the hard-won pleasures of gourmet cooking.
Director Nora Ephron clearly has a passion for food and there are scenes in which she makes the process so vivid that it begins to look easy. She has the visuals down, but her script is a different matter. In her best films (“You’ve Got Mail,“ “When Harry Met Sally”), Ephron creates her characters out of educated, sexually frustrated, New York-dweller archetypes, but when writing for characters who already exist outside of her normal paradigm, Ephron proves uncomfortable in their skin. Luckily, she has good performers on her side.
Amy Adams never fails to be delightful even when she’s given mediocre material.
Julie Powell’s side of the story is rather bland, sometimes making one wish the film was a “Just Julia” show because Meryl Streep, as can be expected, mimics Julia Child with sparkling exactness in a performance that never veers into caricature or satire.
Per the script, the role of Julia isn’t a terribly serious one, but it’s clear that Streep has studied Child’s mannerisms and, of course, her voice. She even mimics the sudden straightening of the back when the chef would sit up, as if suddenly remembering to keep posture a priority. What a chameleon she is.
Both Julie and Julia find themselves charging into new territory. At first glance, one might say that each woman has the same goal: to become a better cook. But this is just Julia’s task—a task that leads her into a future of fame.
Julie Powell already loves to cook (she’s making a beautiful bruschetta in one of her first scenes), but blogging is her challenge. Just as Julia’s new life in France injects her with impetus to cook, so Julie’s goal of cooking and blogging through “Mastering the Art of French Cooking” forces her to become the writer her husband has always told her she is. The real Julie Powell would go on to become a successful published author.
A few years ago, Pixar’s masterful film “Ratatouille,” with the help of a rat with impeccably good taste, told us “anyone can cook.” In Julia Child’s story, her love of eating quickly became a love of cooking. Known for wearing pearls in the kitchen and never, ever disguising her cooking blunders (“Never apologize!” she would always say), she remains a role model for anyone who loves great food – and “Julie & Julia” is a blithe and informative little comedy that is as unpretentious as the legendary chef herself.