Julie & Julia is absolute dynamite. “Based on two true
stories,” as it declares in the beginning, Julie & Julia
follows the food travails of novice cook Julie Powell and Julia Child
before she was a world-famous chef.
It’s 1949, and Child (Meryl Streep) arrives in Paris with her
diplomat husband, Paul (Stanley Tucci). Child is bored and doesn’t want
to waste her time in the City of Light like the other diplomats’ wives,
so she seeks out a hobby. She loves to eat and immerses herself in
French cuisine. Two observations change her life: French people eat
French food every day, and there’s no French cookbook written in
English. So she enrolls in the cooking school Le Cordon Bleu and takes
to it like a duck to butter.
It’s 2002, and Powell (Amy Adams) has just moved to Queens with her
editor husband, Eric (Chris Messina). Powell feels inferior to her
same-age friends who are successful businesswomen and high-powered
professionals. She’s a low-level bureaucrat in the post-9/11 NYC
rebuilding effort, and she’s staring at 30 with no real accomplishments
under her belt.
But she loves to write, and she has a desire to learn to cook well.
With the advent of blogs, she has a vehicle for her creativity. Her
idea: to cook the 524 recipes from Child’s Mastering the Art of
French Cooking in 365 days and to blog about it. After all, Eric
tells her, “Julia Child wasn’t always Julia Child.” So Powell launches
the “Julie/Julia Project” on a Salon.com blog, and it takes off like a
well-turned foodie phrase loosed in the hipsterverse.
Streep is dominant as Child. I’ll admit a bias she has to overcome:
I generally think the actress is overrated, with a few, recent-er
exceptions (Adaptation, Doubt). But in Julie &
Julia, she transcends, taking a well-known personality and walking
the performance between familiarity and caricature. Streep’s Child is
physically big and broad and magnanimous — gracefully ungainly.
It’s great physical acting. She nails the voice and mannerisms, too,
and adds a comic flourish that helps define the movie as a comedy
rather than a stuffy biopic.
Adams, too, is swell. She sports a circa-2002 bob haircut and has
kind of a Julie Hagerty thing going on that gives her an infectious
spirit. But Adams also taps into the forlorn underpinnings behind
Powell’s project, and she sells the joy cooking brings her (along with
the attendant relationship indigestion).
For it all, writer/director Nora Ephron may be the strong link in
Julie & Julia. Ephron wrote for Streep way back when with
the drama Silkwood and the autobiographical Heartburn
(with Streep as the Ephron stand-in), but she’s known best for the
rom-com titans Sleepless in Seattle and You’ve Got Mail.
Her touch in Julie & Julia is golden. With a tight grip on
the historical minutiae of both storylines in addition to the enormous
entertainment value at work, Ephron adds an earthy heft to the picture
that lands it between a typically breezy chic flick and a stuffy
biopic. It’s the best movie of the year so far, and I’ve seen The
Hurt Locker.
