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.