Film Review: "Julie & Julia"

Two for the Stove

By A. O. SCOTT
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/
Published: August 7, 2009

This movie has been designated a Critic's Pick by the film reviewers of The Times.

In an understated but nonetheless climactic scene in Nora Ephron’s “Julie & Julia,” Julia Child (Meryl Streep) and her editor, Judith Jones (Erin Dilly), struggle to come up with a title for the culinary doorstopper Julia has spent the past eight years composing. It’s not an especially suspenseful moment — pretty much anyone who has cooked an omelet knows what the book is called — but it gives Ms. Ephron and the audience a chance to savor the precise nature of Julia Child’s achievement.

Jonathan Wenk/Columbia Pictures

Meryl Streep stars as Julia Child in "Julie & Julia."

The book is “Mastering the Art of French Cooking” — not “How To” or “Made Easy” or “For Dummies,” but “Mastering the Art.” In other words, cooking that omelet is part of a demanding, exalted discipline not to be entered into frivolously or casually. But at the same time: You can do it. It is a matter of technique, of skill, of practice.

The impact of that first volume of “Mastering the Art,” and of Child’s subsequent television career (which is mostly tangential to the movie’s concerns), is hard to overstate. The book stands with a few other postwar touchstones — including Dr. Benjamin Spock’s “Baby and Child Care,” the Kinsey Report and Dr. Seuss’s “Cat in the Hat” — as a publication that fundamentally altered the way a basic human activity was perceived and pursued.

Not that Ms. Ephron’s breezy, busy movie traffics in such sweeping historical ideas, except occasionally by implication. Nor does she infuse the happy, well-fed life of her Julia (the main source for whom is a memoir Child wrote with Alex Prud’homme, her great-nephew) with too much grand drama. “Julie & Julia” proceeds with such ease and charm that its audacity — a no-nonsense, plucky self-confidence embodied by the indomitable Julia herself — is easy to miss.

Most strikingly, this is a Hollywood movie about women that is not about the desperate pursuit of men. Marriage is certainly the context both of Julia’s story and of Julie’s (about whom more in a moment), but it is not the point. The point, to invoke the title of a book whose author has an amusing cameo here (played by Frances Sternhagen), is the joy of cooking.
In the vernacular of many American kitchens, “Mastering the Art” is better known simply as “Julia,” and many a kitchen debate has been settled by an appeal to its authority. Should we separate the eggs? Turn the roast? What does Julia say?

In 2002, more than half a century after Julia and her husband, Paul, arrived in France — a debarkation that provides the movie’s opening scene — a young woman named Julie Powell decided to answer that question in the most literal and systematic way imaginable. A would-be writer working at a thankless office job and living with her husband in Long Island City, Queens, Ms. Powell spent a year cooking every single recipe in “Mastering the Art” and writing a blog about the experience. The blog led to the memoir that provided Ms. Ephron’s movie with its title and the lesser half of its narrative.

A downtrodden cubicle inmate named Julie Powell (Amy Adams) decides to prepare all 524 often-daunting recipes in said cookbook, "Mastering the Art of French Cooking," and blog about it.
Photo: Jonathan Wenk/Columbia Pictures

Trimming some fat from Ms. Powell’s rambling book (and draining some of the juice as well), Ms. Ephron’s script emphasizes the parallels between the lives of her leading characters, who never meet. (They appear on screen together only when Julie watches Julia on television). Julie (Amy Adams) and Julia have loving, supportive husbands — the affable Chris Messina is Eric Powell; the impeccable Stanley Tucci is Paul Child — who only occasionally express impatience with their wives’ gastronomic obsessions. (Paul by arching an eyebrow, Eric by storming out of the apartment.)

Both women take up cooking out of a restless sense of drift — “I need something to dooooo,” Julia exclaims — and both pursue it in the service of a latent but powerful ambition. Publishing success is the happy ending to both tales, and Ms. Ephron, a literary and journalistic star before she was a filmmaker, is unequivocal in her celebration of the joys of such triumph.
Julie, in an early scene, is humiliated by a table full of college friends who flaunt their BlackBerrys, assistants, real estate deals and lucrative glossy-magazine gigs. But by means of failed aspics and triumphant sauces, Julie shows them all up. And Julia, similarly, overcomes the xenophobia and sexism of the French culinary establishment and the myopia of an American publisher and becomes the person we know as Julia Child.

As does Ms. Streep. By now this actress has exhausted every superlative that exists and to suggest that she has outdone herself is only to say that she’s done it again. Her performance goes beyond physical imitation, though she has the rounded shoulders and the fluting voice down perfectly.
Often when gifted actors impersonate real, familiar people, they overshadow the originals, so that, for example, you can’t think of Ray Charles without seeing Jamie Foxx, or Truman Capote without envisioning Philip Seymour Hoffman. But Ms. Streep’s incarnation of Julia Child has the opposite effect, making the real Julia, who died in 2004, more vivid, more alive, than ever.

In Mr. Tucci Ms. Streep finds, as in “The Devil Wears Prada,” a perfect foil. Like the character he plays, he is gallant and self-assured and able to assert a strong sense of his own presence even as he happily cedes the center of attention. Together, their mastery of the art is so perfect that even quiet, transitional scenes between them are delightful. (And when Jane Lynch shows up as Dorothy, Julia’s sister, the delight ascends to an almost indecent level of giddiness).

If only Mr. Tucci and Ms. Streep were in every movie, I thought to myself at one point, as, in a state of rapture, I watched them sit still on a couch looking off into space.

The problem is that when they aren’t on screen in this movie, you can’t help missing them. Ms. Adams is a lovely and subtle performer, but she is overmatched by her co-star and handicapped by the material. Julia Child could whip up a navarin of lamb for lunch, but Meryl Streep eats young actresses for breakfast. Remember Anne Hathaway in “The Devil Wears Prada”? Amanda Seyfried in “Mamma Mia!”? Neither do I.

The deck is further stacked against Ms. Adams by the discrepancy between Ms. Powell’s achievement and Ms. Child’s, and by a corresponding imbalance in Ms. Ephron’s interest in the characters. The conceit of parallel lives is undone by the movie’s condescending treatment of Julie and also by its ardent embrace of the past at the expense of the present.

From the very start, Paris in the late ’40s and early ’50s is — well, it’s postwar Paris, a dream world of fabulous clothes, architecture, sex, food, cigarettes and political intrigue. And New York in 2002 is made, a little unfairly, to seem drab and soulless by comparison. Queens, demographically the most cosmopolitan of the five boroughs and something of a foodie mecca, is treated with easy Manhattanite disdain, as a punch line and punching bag.

The unevenness of “Julie and Julia” is nobody’s fault, really. It arises from an inherent flaw in the film’s premise. Julie is an insecure, enterprising young woman who found a gimmick and scored a book contract. Julia is a figure of such imposing cultural stature that her pots and pans are displayed at the Smithsonian. The fact that Ms. Ephron, like Julie herself, is well aware of this gap does not prevent the film from falling into it. All the filmmaker’s artful whisking can’t quite achieve the light, fluffy emulsion she is trying for.

But an imperfect meal can still have a lot of flavor, and the pleasures offered by this movie should not be disdained. Julia Child knew what to do with a broken sauce or a half-fallen soufflé: serve it anyway, with flair and without apology. What would Julia say? What she always said: Bon appétit!


“Julie and Julia” is rated PG-13. It has mild profanity, and the indulgence — in exquisite moderation — of a few choice vices.

JULIE & JULIA

Opens on Friday nationwide.

Written and directed by Nora Ephron; based on “My Life in France” by Julia Child with Alex Prud’homme, and “Julie & Julia” by Julie Powell; director of photography, Stephen Goldblatt; edited by Richard Marks; music by Alexandre Desplat; production designer, Mark Ricker; produced by Ms. Ephron, Laurence Mark, Amy Robinson and Eric Steel; released by Columbia Pictures. Running time: 2 hours 3 minutes.

WITH: Meryl Streep (Julia Child), Amy Adams (Julie Powell), Stanley Tucci (Paul Child), Chris Messina (Eric Powell), Jane Lynch (Dorothy McWilliams), Linda Emond (Simone Beck), Erin Dilly (Judith Jones) and Frances Sternhagen (Irma Rombauer).


Related

Full Stomachs, and Full Marriages Too (August 2, 2009)

Film Food, Ready for Its ‘Bon Appetit’ (July 29, 2009)

Spare Times (August 7, 2009)

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