JULIA & JULIE

JULIA & JULIE
Movie (2009), 123 min
Director: Nora Ephron

Young Julie Powell (Amy Adams) sets herself the challenge of cooking all the recipes in Julia Child’s “Mastering the Art of French Cooking,” blogs about her progress and setbacks, and after a year completes the task. In a parallel story set in the 1950s, Julia Child (Meryl Streep) goes to Le Cordon Bleu in Paris, learns to cook the way the French do, and with partner cooks begins her book, “Mastering the Art of French Cooking.”

I wanted to see much less of Julie and much more of Julia. It hardly needs saying that Streep comes across with the real Child’s high-pitched good cheer, skill, and determination. And she is funny, as in one scene where she breaks a flipped omelet (I think it was an omelet), says, “You’re alone in the kitchen, you can salvage anything!,” and proceeds to fix the broken omelet. In a recent piece on ABC, that scene was repeated from Julia Child’s real TV show, and it was just as cheering to a cook like me; I am always breaking (and patching together) flappable things like omelets and pancakes (excuse me, I should be making crepes).

Julie, the blogger, comes across as so self-centered and thoughtless that I wanted to kick her. Nora Ephron, I suppose, is good at this sort of romance, but the sex between Julia’s husband Paul and Julia seems rich and fulfilling, whereas Julie and husband Eric (Chris Messina) are drab by comparison. Eric is a saint, putting up with the so-called melt-downs when Julie flubs a recipe, but he doesn’t like being called a saint. Eric is the only really likeable thing about the Julie side of the story. What’s weird is that Julie works in an agency dealing with 9/11 victims, listening to horrific stories from survivors or relatives of survivors, and once in a while she weeps lightly over a story; but a burned stew is a catastrophe worthy of one of her “melt-downs.”

Spare me. I loved Julia Child in the 1960s and followed many of her recipes. Some were triumphs. Others, such as my version of osso buco, were among the worst kitchen productions I’ve experienced, at home or dining out. So I’d much rather have seen a movie called “Julia.”

The sound track was full of great tunes from the periods (the 1950s in Paris for Julia, the 1990s-2000s for Julie), but it was instrusive as can be. The sound editor damped the volume just in the nick of time when dialogue interrupted him/her, with abrupt cutbacks that bothered me.

But, all that said, the movie held my attention from opening credits to closing, and I left the theater smiling. Paris looked so beautiful, the food looked so tasty, Eric and Paul were such quintessentially nice guys, Julia was such a bon vivant, and the dinner parties looked like so much fun, that I wanted to go right out and socialize, over food, naturally. All in all, the movie was a pleasure to see and experience.

Wait for the DVD, though, so you can fast-forward the Julie side of the story, unless you enjoy watching the lovely Amy Adams gazing less than soulfully at her computer as she recites her blog while typing it. Ugh.

Julie Powell’s book, on which the film is based:



I can't determine when the book was first published, but the blog was started in 2002.