Julie & Julia

Food films are about emotional transformation. Usually they are more about the latter than actual cooking. Think of one of the best, Babette’s Feast (1987) – a dour Calvinistic community on the Danish coast is transformed, for a night at least, into a merry band of bon vivants.  In Sandra Nettelbeck’s Mostly Martha (2001), the main dish was Martha. What she cooked, we hear about but never see. Julie & Julia certainly fits the general description, with the prosaic lives of two women’s being transformed, but it is a relatively different addition to the genre in that real cooking is such a central feature of it.

Nora Ephron’s screenplay deftly interweaves the separate stories of two women, united by a motivating self-perception of irrelevancy, who imbue their lives with meaning through the joys (and trials) of cooking. I had never heard of  Julia Childs but apparently she was a well-known pioneer of gourmet cooking in America (so well known that, as we see, Dan Aykroyd parodied her TV show, The French Chef).  Even if you know nothing of her you will have no doubt (and you can verify the accuracy via YouTube) that the peerless Meryl Streep has her down to a “T”. A disarmingly unguarded, large-framed woman, Childs’ straight-forward enthusiasm for French cooking inspired a generation of American housewives habituated to re-heating processed food at meal-time.

The section of the film that deals with Child’s Parisian sojourn is a delight. Streep’s performance is irresistible but the film seduces us with a gorgeous late 1940s to mid-1950s Parisian interior and exterior decor. Fortunately, Childs’ husband, Paul, was a U.S. diplomat and that justifies a well-to-do, visually pleasing setting for the narrative. As Child's loving husband, Stanley Tucci proves a charming but unobtrusive support (they had starred together in a not altogether similar relationship in The Devil Wears Prada. 2006).

The other part of the film deals with blogging office clerk, Julie Powell, and the cramped apartment in Queens she shares with her hubby (Chris Messina) and the ghost of Julia past. The generational contrast is quite nicely handled. Social and personal etiquette has changed drastically in 50 years and the film demonstrates that effectively but without fuss. The problem is however that modern life is soooooo unglamorous and thus this part of the film is far less engaging.  Ephron doesn’t give us anything to replace the retro-charm that makes the other half of Julie & Julia work so well (there is also a quietly alluded-to sub-theme about Julia's inability to have children that gives it added depth). There’s a bit of marital tiff as Julie obsesses over her blog but the main problem is that at the level of both written characters and actual performances, Julie and Eric are so uninteresting and Adams (who was so much more suited to her role as a young nun opposite Streep in Doubt earlier this year) and Messina similarly bland, that I couldn’t wait to get back to Julia and Paul. Ephron really should have spiced up this section of her script.

Although well within the “chick flick” category, I am sure, many a husband will be dragged to Julie & Julia by their enthusiastic wives. I am equally sure many of the latter (and perhaps some of the former) will be rushing back home to roll up their sleeves and get cooking, albeit hopefully something other than Childs’ fatty, high-cholesterol recipes.

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