Reviewed by Lamar Kukuk
8/15/09
I once heard Julie Powell's
story on a network news show, and for obvious reasons, it really struck
a chord with me. Pretty much all of us who've carved out a little
corner of the Internet to write about our favorite topics do so for the
love of expressing ourselves and sharing our voice with the world at large.
But anybody who'd tell you they haven't once dreamed of being “discovered”
online and <gasp> paid to do what we love (unlike the bulk of us who
must settle for being paid to do what we hate) is lying. And thanks
to her popular blog The Julie/Julia Project, Julie Powell did just
that. In an even bigger break, she's now been immortalized in her
very own movie, Julie & Julia, the first major studio film to
be based on a blog. But writer/director Nora Ephron hit on a true
stroke of genius: Powell's tale of cooking her way from one end of
Julia Child's iconic Mastering the Art of French Cooking to the
other isn't really the stuff of a full movie, and as such she's combined
it with a filming of Child's posthumously-published autobiography My
Life in France. And by telling the stories of two women's journey
to their first published book that just happens to pass through the same
set of French recipes, she's created a bouyant, joyous ode to finding one's
way in the world. And make no mistake, while the Powell segments
are solid, Child's story absolutely glows thanks to yet another of Meryl
Streep's seemingly inexhaustible repertoire of career highlights.
2002: Julie Powell
(Amy Adams) finds herself on the eve of her 30th birthday having given
up after 8 years trying to sell a novel, working at a depressing cubicle-jockey
job she hates. Many of her friends have become wildly successful,
including one who touts her privileged lifestyle in a blog. Encouraged
by her husband Eric (Chris Messina), amateur cook Julie starts a blog of
her own, one with an ambitious premise: she will cook all 524 recipes
in Julia Child's Mastering the Art of French Cooking in a single
year and report the results. At first, the blog is ignored, then
it becomes a hit. But can the Powells' marriage survive a year that's
all about Julie and her project? 1948: newlyweds Julia (Meryl
Streep) and Paul Child (Stanley Tucci) move to Paris, where he's been stationed
as a diplomat. At the age of 36, Julia falls in love with French
cooking at a time when she's searching for a new career. Encouraged
by Paul, she attends the Cordon Bleu cooking school, then becomes the partner
of cooking teachers Simone Beck (Linda Emond) and Louisette Bertholle (Helen
Carey). They're working on a French cookbook for Americans, and ask
Julia to join the project that will eventually become the book that inspired
Julie Powell. That is if, as the years drag on, she'll ever finish
it, as the suspicious eyes of Senator Joseph McCarthy fall upon her husband.
The Powells have their marriage
problems, the sprectre of McCarthyism haunts Paul Child, and both women
struggle with the question of whether they will ever get their words out
to the world at large, but Julie & Julia is first and foremost
a happy movie about the joy of A)cooking and B)doing anything you love.
The Childs may well be the happiest, most functional married couple to
headline a movie this decade, and it's truly a joy to watch Streep and
Tucci together. For that matter, pretty much every second Streep's
Julia Child is on-screen is joyous. She's every bit the icon who
later charmed generations with her television shows, loving food, loving
cooking, and loving doing both the right way. But she's never a caricature,
always letting us see the very real fire to be a success at what she's
chosen to do, the same fire that burns in an entirely different way in
Julie Powell five decades later. But while Powell, a woman of the
21st Century, explodes in self-pity at the drop of a hat, WWII spy Julia
Child (a fact that only recently came to light and is deftly referenced
in an early line of dialog) seeks the positive in everything. Watch
the way she handles the tension between Beck and Bertholle when the later's
less than sparkling work ethic becomes an issue in the splitting of the
book's profits. And for that matter, her relentless optimism in the
face of Paul's troubles. Tucci pitches his performance just right:
he's as quiet as his wife is loud, as droll as she is funny. They're
a true couple that just happens to fit together like puzzle pieces.
Emond and Carey are delightful as well, the later being particularly charming
as a Parisian culinary slacker.
Meanwhile, in 2002, Adams
is perfectly cast as Powell because she's the absolute Master of seeming
like she's absorbed all the misfortune her heart can bear (as when she
played a very different character under very similar circumstances in Sunshine
Cleaning). Julie's job taking phone calls for the Lower Manhattan
Development Corporation is truly nasty, and anyone who's ever worked in
a phone bank will recognize the horrors she deals with and Adams' spot-on
helpless despair in the face of them. Mary Kay Place adds to the
pressure cooker with a nice performance as her awful Mom, heard only as
a nagging voice on the phone. Among the major characters, only Eric
doesn't really come off, forced to either support The Julie/Julia Project
or not at any given moment and handed not a single other character trait.
It hadn't been a kind decade
to Ephron, who followed up a string of 90's hits like Sleepless in Seattle,
Michael and You've Got Mail with the 2000 flop Lucky Numbers
(shot in part in my adopted hometown of Palmyra, PA, and a really delightful
film for residents of central Pennsylvania: too bad 99.9 percent
of the world ISN'T from central Pennsylvania) and the 2005 disaster Bewitched.
But she's back on her game here, skillfully summoning the two different
time periods, threading the two books together to feel like the same movie,
and presiding over some really impressive movie magic to add 8 inches to
Streep's height. I also appreciated that the first movie based on
a blog really seems to know the Internet. From the realistic look
of all the on-screen graphics to the script's grasp of the dynamics of
blog comments and the way an online audience can feed one's megalomania,
Julie & Julia's Internet is the same one I use. And you don't
see that so often.
*****SPOILER WARNING*****
Gonna discuss something from the last 20 minutes here. Still reading?
OK, late in the game comes something that's oddly out of left field, albeit
absolutely true: the revelation that LA Times columnist Russ
Parsons (not mentioned by name in the movie) showed the blog to the real-life
Child on the eve of her 90th birthday, and the retired chef was not amused.
It's not entirely surprising: it was probably the first blogging
Julia had ever read, and the self-absorbed tone of modern online discourse
is totally at odds with the stiff upper lip of the WWII generation.
But what interests me is not so much that this happened, but that Ephron
felt the need to include it in the movie as it's never mentioned again
after that one scene. Could this be the most significant on-screen
concession we've seen to the Harvey Weinstein era of Award Season campaigning?
Follow my thinking: you're watching Meryl Streep at the top of her
game on a daily basis playing a beloved celebrity, so you know she's going
to have as good a chance as anyone else in whatever year the movie's released
to snag one of those coveted 5 Best Actress nominations. But you
can see it coming... if you don't say it first, competing studios will
be holding on to the bombshell: the real Julia Child didn't even
approve of Julie Powell's blog! The movie is a sham! So, to
beat them to the punch, the filmmakers feel like they HAVE to include this
revelation. Maybe not, but I'm just sayin', that's how it played
from my seat. *****END OF SPOILER*****
Petty concerns aside, I spent
as much of Julie & Julia's running time with a big smile on
my face as any movie I've seen this year. It didn't make me want
to cook or eat any more than usual (both favorite hobbies of mine regardless),
but it certainly made me want to spend time with people as delightful as
the Childs. Which, for two hours, I did. And I got a nice little
boost from the story of a woman who loved food and was finally able to
get paid for writing about it. |
