Julia & Julia - Character Above All

Aug

17

Julia & Julia - Character Above All

≡ Category: Comedy, Drama, Movie Reviews By Country, United States, Worth A Look |
≅ Written by: Michael Kydonieus

Country: United States
Genre: Drama/ Comedy/ Mainstream
Director: Nora Ephron
Year: 2009

Rating:

WORTH A LOOK

Warning: we’re in the land of chick flicks, with a vengeance. Alright, we’re not talking something as radioactive as Bridget Jones’ Diary or The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants, but let’s face it: the audience at the show I attended was 90% women and 75% of those were over 50 years old.

A plot synopsis makes you want to cut your throat rather than endure the boredom. You see, there are twin narratives: back in the 50s, Julia Child finds out that she wants to be a cook, attends cooking school in France, and struggles to finish writing a French cookbook for an American audience; in present time, a 30-year-old woman with a crappy job attempts to restore meaning to her life by cooking all 500+ of Julia Child’s recipes from her cookbook, Mastering the Art of French Cooking, in one year, and blogging about the experience. I mean, gag me with a wooden cooking spoon!

However, all evidence to the contrary, Julia & Julia is actually pretty entertaining. How on earth could that be? After all, movie industry professionals invented the term “soft” for stories like these, without the slightest suspense or basic narrative interest.

Well, for a couple of reasons, the first of which is Julia Child herself. I had always thought of her as something of a clown from her cooking show on PBS, but writer/director Nora Ephron and Meryl Streep portray Julia Child as having an outsized zest for life and an indomitable spirit. And of course, Child’s voice and the way she expresses herself physically are a riot. I was chuckling half of the time Meryl Streep was on screen. She’s a delight as Julia Child. And it helps that the way director Nora Ephron depicts Paris in the 50s makes you want to invent a time machine. The Paris sequences are just lovely.

Also, Nora Ephron had the wit to realize that audiences would tend to view Julie Powell (Amy Adams), as a lightweight. I mean, when you think about it, cooking over 500 recipes in a year and blogging about it has to be one of the most self-indulgent stunts ever. You know that Powell and her husband couldn’t have possibly eaten all that food. A lot of it went into the garbage. But Ephron is smart enough to paint Powell’s job working for the government as a soul killing hell on earth. She’s forced to either endure the rants of people shafted by the bureaucracy or grieve along with victims of the 911 tragedy over and over, all day long. So, her decision to blog about cooking the recipes in Julia Child’s cookbook comes off as a last ditch effort to hold onto her sanity, which certainly is sympathetic. Actress Amy Adams almost manages to make this twit likeable.

But really, that’s it. Ephron manages to keep Julie Powell from being hateful and entertains us with Julia Child’s personality and Meryl Streep’s protean comic gifts. There’s next to no story. What? Are we supposed to be kept on pins and needles over whether Julia Child is going to publish her cookbook? Who cares if Julia Powell actually finishes something (she wrote half of a novel and gave up) or not?

Towards the end of Julia & Julia, I started to get restless. Yes, Nora Ephron does a great job of overall pacing, the depiction of Paris in the 50s, developing the relationship between Julia Child and her husband Paul (Stanley Tucci), and defusing the potentially deadly Julia Powell character, but that’s barely enough.

Now, I happen to think Julia Child is funny, Meryl Streep is a fantastic comic actress, and I love to cook, so Julia & Julia worked for me, but for a lot of guys, cauterizing their eyeballs with white hot knitting needles would be preferable to sitting through this chick flick. Still, Julia & Julia is a competently directed and written chick flick, so I’ll give credit where credit is due: 3 1/2 stars on craft alone and a Worth A Look rating for general entertainment value. Proceed at your own risk.

Note: Something kind of surprising for a major studio release; the boom mike shows in one scene not once, not twice, but three times. It’s understandable that the editor might not catch it since the movie is being edited on a much smaller screen, but there’s no excuse for not erasing the mistake with CGI.