Film Review: Julie & Julia (2009)

Julia: I’m going to be a writer!
Eric: You are a writer.

Julie & Julia is about many things, but surprisingly, one thing that it is not about is cooking.

As anyone who hasn’t been living in Antarctica the last six months probably knows, Meryl Streep headlines this wonderful film about two parallel lives occupying two different timelines: Streep is Julia Child, the legendary American chef and author of Mastering The Art of French Cooking, and Amy Adams is Julie Powell, an anonymous government clerk dwelling in an anonymous government cubicle, who one day hits upon the idea of writing a blog that will record her experiences cooking all 524 recipes in Child’s magnum opus in the course of one year.

I know. For a thirty-year-old secretary, the girl is ambitious.

The film is based on “two true stories,” Powell’s erstwhile blog (titled “The Julie/Julia Project“) and Child’s memoir, the endlessly fascinating and well-written My Life in France. It intercuts between 1950′s Paris and modern-day New York, between Child’s delight at living and working and loving in the City of Light, studying at the formidable Le Cordon Bleu with fellow American students (all men), and Powell’s exhausting attempt to balance a demanding job trying to help 9/11 survivors and victims’ families claim their benefits with her new project, not to mention her marriage to the long-suffering Eric.

While Streep (as Child) whips and chops and slices and dices and beats the hell out of that ginormous mortar and pestle in her airy Parisian kitchen, Adams struggles with murdering live lobsters in her tiny Queens kitchenette. Child blossoms from being the wife of an intelligence officer (Child herself was in the intelligence services during World War II) to collaborating with two French fellow chefs in writing what would ultimately become MTAFC. Adams lurches in fits and starts, plowing her way through increasingly difficult recipes and occasionally questioning her sanity.

The food does indeed look delectable; you want to jump at the screen and devour everything in sight, even the burned, crispy-looking boeuf bourguignon. But most of all, this is a film about two different women, one of whom inspires the other to an almost worshipful degree, who long to find meaning in what they believe to be otherwise aimless lives. Both women display remarkable stamina and bullheadedness, sometimes to the point of alienating people around her (although Paul, Julia’s husband, played by the ever-reliable Stanley Tucci, takes his wife’s obsession a bit more in stride than Eric does) because of their single-minded pursuit of their ambitions.

Nevertheless, with their tenacity, talent, and not a little bit of luck, they do eventually hit pay dirt, and they each experience the absolute bliss and self-satisfaction of a hard-won dream come true. And yes, again, these are two true stories. Somewhat embellished, I’m sure (especially Powell’s narrative), but otherwise great, true-to-life examples of what happens when God smiles on you.

Streep is, as always, pure magic. She nails her character’s walk, speech, and mannerisms, and her chemistry with her co-star, Tucci, is so touching, I cried just watching him smooth her hair or merely look at her. It’s a little disconcerting at times to see the lengths to which the film crew must have gone through to give the illusion of towering height with Streep (who is 5’6″ versus Child’s 6’2″), because sometimes you could just tell it was all smoke and mirrors and lifts and apple boxes, but no matter. It’s impossible to find a single flaw in her and Tucci’s performances, so I simply sat back and bathed in the warm glow of a woman finding her voice, her life’s work, her life’s meaning, not to mention her soulmate.

Adams holds her own, although it must help that she and Streep don’t actually have any scenes together. Chris Messina does what he can with a relatively underwritten role as Eric Powell. Like Streep, Adams has a delicate, expressive face, and she makes the most of her character’s occasional mental breakdowns.

Is it perfect? No, far from it. I’m not sure that tackling parallel storylines in a single film was really the way to go. If you’ve read Child’s My Life in France, you’ll know just how inspiring and compelling her story was. It would make an appealing film in its own right. Did they really need to shoehorn Powell’s own bio into it? If you have indeed read Child’s book, you’ll know just how much blood, sweat and tears she poured into it, the very long hours, days, weeks, years she devoted to perfecting it. It wasn’t at all the romantic life of the struggling writer, and that’s what Child was: not just a chef but a writer. Non-writers (and non-cooks) have a difficult time truly understanding how much real, hard work is involved in the craft. Now imagine juggling two different, but equally demanding disciplines simultaneously: writing and cooking, as Child did. (Her editor, Judith Jones, recently was quoted in an interview describing Child as a “very, very serious person with a mission.” Apparently, Child wasn’t too crazy about Powell’s project and considered it ‘disrespectful,’ not serious enough. If you think of the sheer amount of work that Child put into her masterpiece and the years she spent perfecting her craft, I can kinda see where she’s coming from.)

Not that Powell’s story doesn’t deserve to be told either — as a blogger and aspiring writer myself, I can totally relate to her feelings of inadequacy and irrelevance, even to the meltdown she had on her kitchen floor — but again, hers should have had its own treatment, its own two hours of film. Powell herself has admitted that the film doesn’t go far enough in describing just how challenging it became to maintain not only her personal well-being but also her marriage while pursuing her goal. Her next book, Cleaving: A Story of Marriage, Meat, and Obsession (forthcoming December 2009), is a brutally honest account of an extramarital affair that threatened to drive her and Eric to divorce court. At the risk of sounding like a cold-hearted Hollywood producer, that has blockbuster drama written all over it, too.

Another thing that perplexed me about this film was how different the dialogue was between the two storylines. Of course, language and speech patterns change over time, even within a decade, but while the Child segments were witty and natural and believable, the conversations between Powell & Company sounded, well, like a Nora Ephron script. And not always in a good way. Don’t get me wrong, I love Nora Ephron, and have since I first saw When Harry Met Sally. I’m at least a full decade younger than the target audience in her book, I Feel Bad About My Neck, but I still laughed long and loud when I read it.

Still, you know how certain long-established directors and screenwriters with years and years of experience develop a signature look or voice in their work? Ephron has that, and most of the time it works, but in this film the contrast is too sharp between the delightful conversations Child has with her husband and friends, and the snappy one-liners Powell and her group exchange. It’s as if they mashed together an old classic with a contemporary romantic comedy. I think it could work in the right hands, but not very well here.

Overall, though, I truly enjoyed this film. I’m not really sure I would agree that it’s the ultimate foodie flick (unlike, say, Big Night or Eat Drink Man Woman, where the food plays as a starring role), since it’s really more about two equally ambitious but very different women rather than the food they prepare. But the two stories move swiftly, and both leads are so warm and engaging, that you can’t help but be carried along by their infectious enthusiasm for their work and passion. There are so few really good movies now coming out of Hollywood that highlight women finding themselves through meaningful work rather than through love and/or sex, and certainly few with the stellar cast and production values of Julie & Julia. I hope this one is a harbinger of more to come. We women deserve that much, if not more.

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