Men and Women at War: The Hurt Locker and Inglourious Basterds

I like war films. I might as well admit that right off. I find combat represented on the screen compelling to watch, and I don't suppose I'm alone, which is why the war film has been around so long. I saw two interesting war films this summer, very different from one another, but both fascinating in their own ways. Below I've tried to discuss their similarities and differences, and speculate on what the war film might have to say to us all.


MEN AND WOMEN AT WAR

The war film—what is it good for? The human planet seems to live in a perpetual state of aggression, so if war is around constantly it’s no surprise that stories about it follow closely behind. I won’t speculate on whether war is the natural state of the species or learned social behavior, but the war film, as a product of popular culture, is most definitely learned--learned, preserved, and passed down from one generation to the next by the rules of genre. This past summer saw the release of two war films so different from one another in every way that taken together they provide a course of instruction on how flexible those genre rules are, and how rich a field for character development and narrative invention the war film can be.

Kathryn Bigelow’s The Hurt Locker was released in June to critical acclaim, most of it deserved. An austere character study set in contemporary Iraq, her film focuses on Sgt. William James (Jeremy Renner), leader of an elite bomb disposal squad who likes his job a little too much. James takes over the unit after the well-liked former leader is killed, and he immediately begins to alienate his new crew (Anthony Mackie and Brian Geraghty) by taking unnecessary risks and acting impulsively instead of doing things by the book. On his first assignment, he rashly removes his protective gear (a concussion suit that makes him look like a deep sea diver), as his two subordinates watch in horror. Though it ultimately serves his purpose--the bulky suit impedes his efforts at disarming a complex car bomb--his actions place not only himself but his teammates at risk, since they do not know how to react to the unorthodox situation he creates. Afterward, they express their displeasure, but James is unimpressed. His entire attitude says, “I do things my way, get used to it.” But how can his men rely on a leader who seems indifferent to danger, theirs as well as his?

This conflict threads its way through Locker, an episodic film held together mainly by Renner’s quiet but forceful characterization of the unpredictable James. As each new threat presents itself, James approaches it in a way that is unexpected and personal, while his confused men try to decide if he knows what he’s doing or he’s crazy. The answer may be a bit of both, although the film gives us only a couple of tantalizing glimpses into James’s psyche. In one of them, he forms a bond with an Iraqi boy who sells bootleg dvds to soldiers. Later, in one of the film’s grisliest sequences, he and his team are called to dismantle a bomb that’s been placed inside the body of a murdered young boy, and James becomes convinced it’s the one he has befriended. Angry and seeking revenge, the normally cool James slips into occupied territory at night to discover the ones responsible. The result of his actions—reckless even by his standards—almost leads to greater tragedy.

Because the film maintains such a restricted focus, its depiction of the war is filtered almost entirely through James’ experience of it; as a consequence, the meaning of what we see depends largely on the emotional impact it has on him. But the detached and enigmatic James is never easy to read, and Renner’s understated performance deliberately keeps the viewer at a distance, guessing at what’s going on behind his squinting eyes. What is clear is that James’ fight is never one about politics or mere survival. For him, unlike the others, the disarming of bombs is a personal challenge that feeds his need for excitement: he’s hooked on the danger, addicted to the feeling of being one false move away from obliteration. Amid the chaos of battle, James pits himself against time and the ingenuity of the saboteurs, and lives for the rush that comes when he overcomes both. The outcome of the combat around him is relevant only insofar as it enables him to play and win this deadly game.

The Hurt Locker is disenchanted about its war, but it’s not exactly an anti-war film. War doesn’t seem to be the problem here; rather, it’s the personality that succumbs to the lure of its violence, the man for whom war is a drug. The reckless devotion to risk-taking is an expression of individuality that threatens the safety of his team, the social unit whose survival depends on each member performing his duty responsibly. Bigelow’s film features many of the horrors of combat, and makes effective use of the aridity and bleakness of the Iraqi war’s setting to comment metaphorically on its purpose, but lurking behind the rubble of the ruined cityscapes and countryside is a somewhat conservative message about military conduct. The war itself is never directly examined.

Every big war is made up of a lot of little wars, and The Hurt Locker takes an unflinching look at a particularly troubling one. The renegade soldier is not a new figure in the war film by any means. One could identify a whole subgenre devoted to his exploits, and certain films have given themselves over entirely to the debate surrounding individual needs vs. group rights in wartime. Because combat involves a social unit under extreme duress, maybe that is the central question of all war films, whether they explicitly address it or not. Films as different as Air Force (1943) and The War Lover (1962) consider it soberly, others like The Dirty Dozen (1967) have guilty fun with it, and still others such as Sylvester Stallone’s cartoonish Rambo films exploit it so irresponsibly they abandon the war film’s moral field of vision altogether. I do not mind violence as self-expression in action movies, but in the context of war I’m troubled by the message such abandonment to unilateral action can send. The Hurt Locker neither condones nor condemns James’ behavior, but clearly observes it with concern: this is why war might exist, it is thinking, because too many men can’t live any other way.

Which brings us to the summer’s other foray into the combat zone, writer-director Quentin Tarantino’s bizarre World War II fantasy, Inglourious Basterds. Tarantino’s films are populated with people who can’t live any other way than through violence—criminals, cops, hitmen/women, martial artists. Now he adds soldiers to their ranks. Basterds is appropriately titled: the film could be the love child of The Dirty Dozen and To Be or Not to Be (1942), Ernst Lubitsch’s famous wartime “Nazi comedy.” If you can imagine such a thing. Fortunately, you don’t have to, because that’s QT’s job, creating films of odd parentage--visually stunning, narratively daring, and frequently exasperating mélanges of differing styles and influences drawn from his favorite movies, genres, pulp novels, comic books, popular music, and maybe even breakfast cereals. His films are eclectic, to say the least. Inglourious Basterds does not break the mold.

But it damn near blows it up. Basterds features a typical Tarantino story filled with multiple plotlines and characters crossing each others’ paths in ways that seem both random and fated. The chaos is carefully orchestrated, however, around two revenge tales taking place in Occupied France. The first concerns the French side of the war. In a grim and moving prologue, a Jewish family is discovered hiding in a farmhouse and brutally executed by SS troops under the command of Col. Hans Landa (Christoph Waltz). The lone survivor is a teenage girl who runs away once the shooting starts. She runs all the way to Paris, where the film finds her a few years later operating a cinema. Now an attractive young woman, Shosanna (Melanie Laurent) catches the eye of a German private (Daniel Bruhl) who shares her interest in films. In fact, he has just finished starring in one himself, a propaganda picture based on his own wartime exploits, which have made him the darling of the Third Reich. The Reich badly needs heroes like him because the war is not going well (it is 1944, shortly after D Day), so the German High Command decides to boost morale with a gala premiere of the film in Paris. The lovestruck private insists it be held in Shosanna’s theater as a way to curry favor with her. Shosanna has so far managed to fend off his advances, and he sees this as the final maneuver in his campaign to get her into bed. It is a very big mistake.

Meanwhile, in another part of Occupied France, a group of Americans is fighting a different, but still very personal, kind of war. Lt. Aldo Raine (Brad Pitt) is in charge of the “Basterds,” a special unit of Jewish-American soldiers trained to fight commando style behind enemy lines. They have been recruited for this task specifically because of their Jewish heritage: Raine is counting on their desire for revenge against the Nazis to make them ruthless killing machines. Nicknamed the “Apache,” he demands that they not only kill as many Nazi soldiers as they can but scalp them as well. His intent is to create a reputation for his band so fearsome that its very name will strike terror into German soldiers’ hearts. To this end, the Basterds always leave one soldier alive to spread the word of their savagery and seeming invincibility. It's safe to say their strategy works: in addition to killing all his comrades, they carve a swastika into the survivor’s forehead so he will carry the mark of his Nazi past the rest of his life.

These two storylines are eventually brought together by a third: British intelligence learns that the film premiere will be attended by all the top members of the Nazi Party-- Goering, Goebbels, Bormann, even der Fuehrer himself. An opportunity to wipe out the upper echelon of Nazi power in one blow is too valuable to pass up, so they send one of their agents to Germany to lead the Basterds in an assault on the cinema. The choice of agent is wholly indicative of Tarantino’s sly sense of humor and adroit manipulation of the absurd. Lt. Archie Hicox (Michael Fassbender) is an erudite gentleman spy, but he’s also a former film critic, and for this reason is considered—by no less than Winston Churchill himself!—the perfect man to lead an attack on a movie theater. Maybe Tarantino has felt so manhandled by critics over the years he imagines they want to destroy the theaters in which his films are showing and assault his audiences. Or maybe he’s mocking the inadequacy of critics to judge the kinds of movies he’s making. Whatever the underlying joke might be, Hicox, though earnest, proves not to be the right man for the job after all. Before their plans are finalized, the Basterds are on their own in the plot to take out Hitler and his inner circle.

But they will get help nonetheless. Unknown to everyone else, Shosanna is planning a reception of her own for the Nazi elite. Consumed by the desire for revenge, she decides to burn the theater down while the audience is engrossed in watching the film. Her plan is to bar the doors from the outside to keep anyone from escaping, then ignite a stack of film reels behind the theater’s screen. The highly combustible nitrate stock will spread the fire quickly, and almost before they know what is happening to them, the Nazi audience will be immolated. But before this happens, her vengeance demands something more. She makes a short film in which she indicts the Nazis for their crimes against her people and her nation, and then informs them of the horrible fate that awaits them at her hands. Splicing this piece of film into the movie’s final reel, it provides the cue for the conflagration to begin. The revenge Shosanna seeks is both historical and personal in nature: seated in the audience alongside Hitler and company is her nemesis, Col. Hans Landa, perpetrator of her family’s murder.

This, then, is the set-up for the cataclysmic and provocative end to Tarantino’s strange and violent daydream about the Second World War. Because Tarantino likes to take risks, the denouement of his film both fulfills our expectations and shocks us by doing so. Set in an Occupied France that could exist only in one of his fever dreams, Basterds provides rather far-fetched Alternative History, taking the “What if?” exploration of its subject to an extreme at once comical and disturbing. But also emotionally fulfilling: the film is, after all, a revenge fantasy for two populations horrifically wronged by the Nazis, Jewish victims of the Holocaust and the conquered French people. These populations come together in Shosanna, the French Jewish girl, who achieves a kind of apotheosis in her final moments, her oversize image staring down from the movie screen engulfed in flames like a fiery Avenging Angel. For the Jews and French who suffered, this is a moment of long overdue, if purely cinematic, triumph.

As war films, The Hurt Locker and Inglourious Basterds are comrades in arms, but stylistically they belong to opposite camps. Locker is a study in understatement, from Renner’s internalized acting to the cinematography’s bland palette of desert tans and grays, and Bigelow’s handheld camera makes frequent forays into the streets to capture the look and feel of the Iraqi conflict with an immediacy that gives the illusion of being unplanned. By contrast, everything in Basterds is designed to show the craft at work. Photographed in rich, vibrant colors to invoke Hollywood’s bygone Technicolor era, each shot is artfully composed and framed for maximum movie effect. The complicated story veers between low black comedy and high melodrama, and the performances follow suit, ranging from the sublimely ridiculous (Pitt, superb as the macabre Raine) to the introspective and tragic (Laurent, unfortunately far too passive as Shosanna). Falling somewhere between these extremes are Fassbender’s elegant but twitty Archie Hicox, and a delightfully droll turn by Diane Kruger as a Marlene Dietrich-like German movie actress who is spying for the Allies. The film belongs, however, to Waltz as the sardonic, manipulative, ultra-polished Col. Landa, the character who bridges the two “halves” of the movie (his encounter with Raine at the doomed premiere leads to the film’s amusing and cynical coda). Landa insinuates himself into every corner of the plot, his presence signifying the fate that links all the players together, and Waltz’s charming, suave portrayal is so convincing it manages to make Landa’s detestable presence welcome.

Despite their considerable differences, the two films do share a core belief: the awareness that our fascination with violence and danger is what makes war addictive and the war film compelling to watch. And herein lies the most interesting contrast of all: whereas Locker views the addiction to violence as a threat to the group, in Basterds it’s what holds it together. The over-indulgence in violent, risk-taking behavior is the bond the Nazi-hunting soldiers share—it gives their band the cohesiveness it needs to carry out its bloody work. Tarantino’s film, like so many of his others, inhabits a mostly absurd world where institutions are faulty and corrupt and human relations destructive--it’s only the violence that makes sense. Basterds revels in its depiction of war as an irresistible opportunity to indulge the urge for destruction--war as the will to chaos. But in this contradictory world, war can also be a purifying agent, like the flames that burn away the evil of Nazi Germany during the film’s climax.

This view of war could have troubling implications, if Tarantino’s film weren’t basically smoke and mirrors. The movie-within-a-movie plot showcases the self-reflexivity Tarantino loves to tease his audiences with. Referencing other films and inventing genre pastiches remind us constantly we are watching a movie, so Tarantino is not seriously advocating war as either beneficial to the human race or a bloody good time. Not even his harshest critics would accuse him of that. But it’s worth taking a moment to consider his portrayal of World War II, which still commands respect as America’s last Good War. So what does it mean that QT has detonated a bomb right in the middle of this perception of it? The savagery and black comedy of his cloak-and-bayonet tale presents an image of the U.S. military that is closer to Dr. Strangelove (1964) than to The Longest Day (1962), Saving Private Ryan (1998), or any number of other serious-minded WWII films. The Basterds’ bloodthirsty behavior, urged on by Raine’s screwy orders, seriously taints their mission, however great the crimes they are avenging. As for the historical villains, Hitler and Goebbels, they are presented as caricatures that would fit right into Lubitsch’s To Be or Not to Be, and are perhaps just one campy gesture away from Mel Brooks’ The Producers (1968). In other words, this is not your grandfather’s Second World War.

There have been other World War II comedies, of course, but I can think of no other film that so radically alters the way the Allies’ fighting of that war is represented. In addition to the basic formula of Good vs. Evil, Tarantino gives us Crazy vs. Crazier, with your choice of which side is which. The movie cheerfully writes its own history as well, as if to say the version of the war you’ve been taught up to now is irrelevant, a fiction to be revised as easily as this film does it, or eradicated, like the make-believe architecture of a cinema palace consigned to the flames. The fire that purges history of evil can also burn away its most cherished truths.

As must be the case in all war films, the central conflicts of The Hurt Locker and Inglourious Basterds are conflicts on the world stage, and it’s the different ways they conceive of and utilize their wars in developing story and character that accounts for their divergent personalities. Locker collapses its world conflict into the psyche of one soldier, who serves as a microcosm for the relation between war and the human race. Basterds is more concerned with the internal tensions that define genre, and rewrites its particular war’s history in order to stretch the war film’s boundaries. But they meet on the common ground of one truth that can’t be rewritten: war helps define us, and for that reason each new one is, inevitably, a continuation of the last.

Appaloosa

I wrote this review back in 2008, after seeing this film in the theater. I never got around to posting it here, but I just rewatched the film on dvd and so I thought I would add it now. I would probably change a few things if I were to write it now--my second viewing leads me to believe that Allie isn't quite as mysterious to the people around her as I first thought--but for the most part, I stand by what I wrote over year ago. And, as I said in my Best Films of 2008 roundup, I still think it's the best American western since Unforgiven.


APPALOOSA

Once upon a time in the American cinema, the western was king. Between the silent era and the late 1970’s, the U.S. film industry churned out thousands of western movies, most of them toward the end of that time starring Clint Eastwood. Not so today, when fans like me have to content ourselves with maybe one or two a year, if we’re lucky. Why did the western fade away? Perhaps the very historical process that saw the West itself vanish finally caught up with the stories told about it. This may not be entirely bad. Now that the western is a rarer thing, it’s often treated with greater care and purpose. Contemporary filmmakers may be interested in reexamining, if not reinventing, the genre, or perhaps using it to say something that will appear fresh or different when spoken through its familiar form.

For instance, two recent films have pondered the role of women in American society by investigating their place in the western’s traditionally male-dominated world. Kevin Costner’s Open Range (2003) introduced a poignant subplot that examined the dilemma of spinster Annette Bening, trapped in a forlorn fronteir town with few prospects for happiness. The recently released Appaloosa, co-written, directed by, and starring Ed Harris, goes it one better by moving the heroine to the very center of the film and making her the axis around which the main story revolves. This is a remarkable thing to do in a film that looks at first like a standard though taut action movie devoted to the friendship between two lawmen, longtime partners Virgil Cole (Harris) and Everett Hitch (Viggo Mortensen). Summoned to the town of Appaloosa in New Mexico Territory to rescue it from an egotistical, power-hungry rancher aptly named Randall Bragg (Jeremy Irons), Cole and Hitch begin their assignment with an obligatory showdown in a saloon with three of Bragg’s men. A terse exchange between the unsmiling lawmen and the drunken, contemptuous cowpokes, some lightning-fast gunplay, and the three baddies lie dead, the town leaders know they’ve hired the right men for the job, and we know we’re watching a western.

Except it’s not so clear-cut after that. Just when it looks like the film has settled down to an extended battle of bullets and nerves between Bragg’s gunhands and the two cool but seriously outnumbered lawmen, the train pulls into the station and out steps the fetching Allie French (Renee Zellweger). She immediately catches the eye of both Hitch and Cole, but it’s Marshall Cole she sets her cap for, and almost before you can say “Appaloosa,” they’re setting up house together. Hitch doesn’t know what to make of the rough-and-tumble Cole’s newfound domesticity. Neither does Cole, nor do we. Allie doesn’t seem to fit anywhere into the scenario of violence and frontier justice that we thought we were going to witness.

And it’s precisely because she doesn’t fit that Appaloosa becomes a fascinating exercise in genre reconstruction. Allie introduces a strange, troubling element into the men’s world, not simply because she’s a domesticating female in an undomesticated environment but because she’s at heart undomesticated herself, uncertain of who she is or what she wants. Zellweger’s Allie defies the western’s normal duality of Woman–virgin or whore, schoolmistress or saloon gal. Dressed like a lady but with only a dollar to her name when she alights from the train, she is so out of place that a bemused Cole asks her point blank at their first meeting if she is a whore. Her answer is no, and it’s truthful as far as it goes–which is not the same as the truth.

But the disrupting influence Allie brings to town has only begun. The feud with Bragg eventually leads to his arrest, trial, and conviction for murder, but two of his hired guns kidnap Allie and force Cole to set Bragg free in exchange for her life. They flee, with her as hostage, Cole and Hitch following close behind. But as the two friends track Bragg’s small party through the desert, Allie’s status as hostage and her role in the escape become increasingly clouded by doubt in their minds, and the rescuers ultimately turn into the ones needing rescue.

As the protagonists struggle to decide what to do, and how to feel, about Allie, the film mirrors their confusion in its attempts to figure out her place in the narrative. She is the mystery at the core of a film that by all normal expectations should not have a mystery. Harris’s and Robert Knott’s intelligent screenplay bends genre rules around her to accommodate her troubling presence, her peculiar character changing from scene to scene not from inconsistency in writing but from the changing perceptions of the men about her, as well as those of the audience. Nothing is ever seen from her point-of-view, nor is the story of why and how she came to Appaloosa ever revealed—she is seen and defined only by the shifting points-of-view and attitudes of others. Allie—her name parsing into “A lie”–resides defiantly unknown and unknowable at the still center of the film’s male-storm of emotions.

The performances are uniformly excellent. Harris is wonderfully convincing as the tough, sternly professional lawman who crumbles into a giggling schoolboy upon finding unexpected love, and he and Zellweger have great chemistry, ironically, as the mismatched lovers. Zellweger’s Allie is an ingenious composition of conflicting impulses—coquettish, restless, romantic, defiant, fearful, and utterly lonely in her struggle to choose the right man to protect her, and her resentment that the world she lives in makes that choice impossible to avoid. It's an extremely touching performance. On the other side, Jeremy Irons brings an unexpected dash of effeteness to Bragg, which turns out to be appropriate for a character who, though introduced through a cold-blooded act that marks him as properly ruthless, thereafter expresses his villainy less through brutal intimidation than serpentine charm, emitting the aura of an irresistible opportunist. Since male bonding is still very much at the forefront of Appaloosa’s purpose, however, the film stands or falls on the relationship between Harris and Mortensen. Reteamed after their fine work together in 2005’s A History of Violence, they are letter perfect as violence-weary men so used to each others’ ways and moods that they communicate chiefly through looks and nearly invisible gestures. Mortensen hides his boyish looks behind a Buffalo Bill-like goatee and mustache, which only enhance the deceptively lazy manner and the wise half-smile he’s perfected over the years, the latter slyly hinting that he knows a secret both amusing and dangerous not to know.

And the last act belongs to him. Having eluded his pursuers, Bragg returns to Appaloosa to establish himself in the good graces of the townspeople he once terrorized by opening a plush hotel that brings in business. Sadly watching past associations threaten his friend’s happiness, Hitch makes a desperate decision that tests both his courage and the very friendship his act is meant to honor. Harris’s direction, lean and spare throughout, comes the closest to melodrama in these final scenes, but it’s a forgivable lapse since it’s emotionally right and manages not to disturb the delicate tone of the rueful ending.

That this film can be at once so laconic in form and so emotionally convoluted certainly owes much to its source novel’s author, crime novelist Robert B. Parker (best known for the Spenser mysteries), who also contributes the last act’s atmosphere of big-city corruption and the mysterious femme fatale at the center of events. Could Appaloosa be called a feminist western? Most likely not, but it’s a western any feminist should find interesting. Or anyone, for that matter, who appreciates movies that can look at familiar terrain with a fresh understanding of what it means. The western is one of the American cinema’s most ritualistic forms, but Harris and his crew have stretched its horizons–not outward but inward, into the emotional landscapes of its recognizable but mysterious people.

Julie and Julia

The most delightful film of the summer, Julie and Julia, takes a subject I sadly know little about (cooking) and manages to make it fascinating to me. Inspiring, even. Not that I'm going to rush to the kitchen to try any of this myself, but it's still a delight to see a film that treats cooking with this level of seriousness and passion. Any form of endeavor that becomes a means of self-expression is worthy of such treatment, of course, but American movies generally favor action over character, and cooking-as-creative expression is definitely more for the character-driven kind. This movie is in luck, then, because it has two compelling characters at its center, and two exceptional performers to bring them to life. Following last year's Doubt, in which they went head to head with powerful performances, Meryl Streep and Amy Adams now look like Hollywood's foremost tag-team of actresses. I certainly hope they work together again.


JULIE AND JULIA
　
There aren’t too many films about cooking or enjoying food—go ahead, name one—and certainly not many good ones. Ratatouille, Waitress (pies), the cooking school sequence in Billy Wilder’s Sabrina (1953) are the first that come to my mind. But there’s a new chef in town with the release of Nora Ephron’s Julie and Julia, a marvelously entertaining film about cooking, life, and the enduring legacy of one of TV’s best-loved celebrity chefs, the late Julia Child.

At just a pinch over two hours, this is a remarkably compact film, dishing up two stories side by side and developing each one fully despite cutting their screen times in half. Inspired by Julie Powell’s 2005 bestseller about the year she spent cooking her way through Child’s groundbreaking book Mastering the Art of French Cooking, the film ingeniously expands this limited subject by delving into Child’s own past and dramatizing the events which led to her writing the book that changed not only her life but the way America experienced food.

At thirty, Julie Powell (Amy Adams) is deeply dissatisfied with her life, if not exactly convinced she’s a failure. An aspiring writer with an unfinished novel tucked away in her desk drawer, she toils thanklessly for a company that settles insurance claims for the families of 9/11 victims. Numbed by the heartbreak of her job, and envious of her successful friends, Julie escapes each night into the kitchen where she for once has mastery of something. At the suggestion of her slightly bemused husband, Eric (Chris Messina), she outlines a bold project to help her take more control of her life: make all 524 recipes in Child’s cookbook in a year’s time, and write about her experiences in a blog.

Flash back to fifty years earlier, and Julia Child (Meryl Streep) is about to embark on the adventure that will define who she is. Just arrived in Paris with her diplomat husband, Paul Child (Stanley Tucci), she is enthralled by everything she sees and everyone she meets. But sightseeing, shopping, and eating out are not enough to keep the energetic Julia fully engaged, and she longs for something meaningful to do with her life. She decides that because she loves to eat French food so much, she’d like to learn how to cook it herself. So she enrolls in a prestigious cooking class—and finds her calling. Her success there is followed by an offer to join a pair of French society women in their cooking school and eventually to collaborate with them on their dream project--writing a French cookbook for Americans. The ups and downs of this history-making enterprise occupy the remainder of Child’s half of the film.

No dual-narrative movie worth its salt would fold two stories together without making them complement each other in meaningful ways. Julie/a performs this step effortlessly, comparing and contrasting events, images, and emotions from the two heroines’ lives like perfectly blended ingredients. It is Julie, of course, who imagines the deep connections between her and her fantasy mentor, whom she dreams of meeting but sadly never does (Child died in 2004). The film acknowledges these connections through its ambitious cutting scheme: jumping back and forth through time every few minutes, it broadly parallels Child’s search for the identity everyone knows with Powell’s blossoming into the person the film helps us discover. But the side-by-side progress of the two stories also highlights the important differences between the two women, sometimes humorously and sometimes poignantly.

They are definitely a study in contrasts. The zesty and adventurous Julia adores travel and embraces the exciting new world of Paris, while the less secure Julie stresses over moving from Brooklyn to Queens and beginning life in a new apartment. Child also takes her failures in stride—an amusing montage shows her trying and abandoning various pursuits, such as hat-making and bridge—whereas Powell has regular meltdowns when her cooking project does not go according to plan. And their relationships with their spouses are significantly different, too. Julia and her husband Paul adore each other, and experience no onscreen moments of rancor in what seems to be a marriage of unconditional love and support. Julie and Eric, on the other hand, are not nearly as simpatico. Although clearly in love, their union is contentious at times, due to Julie’s obsessive attention to her pursuit and Eric’s growing jealousy of it, since it seems to be replacing him in her affections.

Easily the film’s most appealing characteristic is how comfortable it is with itself. Its breezy but confident approach to storytelling allows each half to develop on its own terms, with (and around) its own personality, and it never insists on linking the two together for some higher purpose or exalted theme. And yet it’s no creampuff either. Child has her own demons--insecurity about her size and looks, hints of deep hurt at not being able to bear children--and neither half of the film ignores the world in which it takes place. The Childs served together in the O.S.S. during World War II, a fact mentioned more than once, and they are ambushed by the anti-Communist witchhunt of the 1950s. And, of course, the shadow of the fallen World Trade towers hangs over Julie Powell’s life, giving it a melancholy tone and connecting her personal edginess to the time’s deep unease.

This is a performance-rich film, but of course the movie belongs heart and soul to Meryl Streep, who has often been as good but never more engaging. Streep’s evocation of the ebullient Child is simply too wonderful for words. The vocal characterization, with its Child-like cadences and intonations, is dead on, and her body movements—the stiff-backed walk, the way she tosses her head impulsively from one side to the other when struck by a new thought--are a constant delight to watch. But more than just an expert impression, Streep captures Child’s infectious joi de vivre, overabundant enthusiasm, and conviction that every moment in the kitchen is one of both discovery and immense fun. Her performance is damn near perfect.

Adams is left with the difficult task of trying to make the less sympathetic Powell equal in dramatic weight, if not likeability. The latter is impossible, so Adams wisely explores the compulsive underside of her character’s drive to succeed, and the self-doubt that fuels her self-absorption. In her attempt to fulfill her life, Powell almost wrecks it by allowing ambition to endanger her marriage, her job, and a key friendship, but Adams’ heartfelt performance turns this often exasperating character into a winning one, and more importantly produces a sensitive portrait of a flawed but sincere woman struggling to find herself. There’s a cautionary tale tucked neatly into the pages of Powell’s cookbook for life: releasing your ego on the world in blog form is fine if you understand its limits and know how to keep it under control. Otherwise, it’s a recipe for disaster.

In support of these two divas, Stanley Tucci is a standout as the quiet, infatuated Paul, and Jane Lynch does an amusing turn as Julia’s flirtatious (and similarly sized) sister Dorothy. The weakest link is probably Messina as Eric, Julie’s underappreciated spouse. Never quite sure of his role in his wife’s blog-o-drama, Eric understandably sends contradictory messages of support and impatience, depending on his changing moods. But what determines those moods is never explained—all we learn about him is that he writes for an archaeology magazine—and Messina is so complacent about his background role that we never wonder for a moment about his character. His reactions to Julie seem based mainly on whether he feels more hungry or horny at any given moment, and it’s a shame Messina didn’t increase his efforts at either, because that at least would have made Eric more interesting.

Screenwriter-director Ephron demonstrates once again that she has mastered the dual-narrative film. In an up-and-down directorial career that has produced only eight films, the ones that stand out are all patterned on dual stories and/or parallel lives that intersect in unconventional ways. Sleepless in Seattle (1993) and You’ve Got Mail (1998) are romantic-comedies devoted to the pleasant business of bringing Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan together, either by getting them to meet (Sleepless, where they share only the final scene together) or revealing they secretly love one another (Mail, in which they’re unfriendly business rivals anonymously carrying on an internet romance). Julie/a carries the separate lives idea much further, of course, since the two lives are intertwined only in the mind of one of the characters, although the title cleverly suggests the connection is much closer and that Julie and Julia are two sides of the same personality. Which is what imaginary friends really are.

The real Julia Child learned of Powell’s project and dismissed it as “disrespectful,” but despite the hurt this causes Powell (a nicely played scene between Adams and Messina), her last spoken words in the film are “I love you, Julia.” It is a testament to her sense of connectedness to the Child she imagined as her friend and mentor, rather than the real person, and it is this identification that allows her to accept herself at last: she’s become not only the writer, but also the person, she has always wanted to be. Gazing at a portrait of Julia Child hanging in the Smithsonian as she utters these words, Powell is really looking into a mirror and finally liking what she sees. And so should we, musing perhaps over how easily a film about cooking and the love of food has revealed itself to be about how food can be the way to find love itself.