Here is an amazing feat. Equipped with
nothing more than a blog by a New York foodie, Julia Child’s Paris years where
she discovered her calling in the kitchen, and the titular book from 2005,
published some two years after Julie Powell completed the self-imposed task of
cooking her way through Child’s Mastering
the Art of French Cooking in a year, publishing her accomplishments online
along the way, Nora Ephron turned her last film into a highly entertaining
work, full of charm, grace, and heart.
Two-thousand nine was an unusual year for
cinema in the best sense. Its best films, like Inglorious Basterds and District
9, were triumphs of originality and out-of-the-box creativity. Even forays
into familiar territory such as Pixar’s Up
and Harry Potter and the Half-Blood
Prince were brought new surprises. In its own fuzzy little way, Julie & Julia fits well into that
year’s tradition.
Topically, Julie & Julia is as simple a film as one would expect of one
based on the writings of a young office worker from Queens with a love for
cooking and Julia Child (played here with dignified aplomb by Meryl Streep). In
the turn, the Pairs years, though the source for a lifelong career, were also
largely peaceful for the Childs. The bumps in both stories were be hardly
mentioned in higher drama; Julie Powell (Amy Adams) spats with her husband
(Chris Messina) over his flippant response after Knopf Vice President Judith
Jones cancels their dinner plans and, years earlier, Paul Child (Stanley Tucci)
is investigated by the House Un-American Activities for his time in China.
Ephron has little time for drama, resolving everything with a smile. Julie and
Eric are soon back together (he can’t stay away from her cooking) and Paul is
exonerated after an interrogation in Washington. Other signs of heightened emotion
are soothed over before they can become big. For instance, halfway through,
Julia’s sister Dorothy (Jane Lynch) pays a visit from the States and falls for
a shorter man instead of the suitor her sister and brother-in-law arranged for
her to meet. On the other side of the Atlantic in more recent times, Julie
finds no support from her mother back in Texas (to make a point of Julie’s
liberation, Adams sheds away all trace of a Texan idiom which is, by contrast,
reinforced in the mother’s voice). Both of these situations are nipped before
they bloom into trouble. Dorothy’s intended disappears without a trace and
Julie’s mother suddenly becomes a team player with little explanation.
What drama does exist in Julie & Julia concerns inspiration,
dreams, and the disappointments such passions bring. Julie is not so much
depressed by having to living in a decaying flat over a pizzeria as by her
habit of abandoning everything she sets out to do. Her two consistent loves
have been cooking and Julia Child, hence the task that became a book and, then,
this movie. In a year, Julie Powell set out to cook her way through Child’s Mastery of French Cooking, posting her
progress on a daily blog. Blogging was still an emerging trend when Julie
Powell began her mission in 2002, but that may have spurred her success,
exploring an innovative way reaching out to a fan base. And a fan base she
found, once word of her project caught on like wildfire, turning a personal
hobby into a career.
Julia Child is a household name and the
basics of her life are well known. In Paris she discovered the treasures of the
kitchen and built her name around it. By all accounts her life was a happy one
with a supportive husband whose career in government brought her to the city
where she found her calling. But even in this dream of a life, Ephron finds
source for inspiration, sharing some of the difficulties Child had finding a
publisher for her now seminal cookbook which was rejected by Houghton Mifflin
on the basis of its length and finally picked up by Knopf and published in two
volumes.
Julie
& Julia
titles itself a movie based on two true stories. Both are equally delightful,
but the film sets a contrast between the two lives it switches back and forth
from. Paris in the postwar years is a magical city filled with beauty and
romance and simplicity in life. The section of Queens where the Powells move to
from Brooklynis desolate and crumbling and taken over by soulless office
buildings such as the one where Julie works. Even cooking, her point of solace,
didn’t come as easily to her as it did to her idol, but their shared love for
the kitchen bridged the generation, location, and financial differences between
these two women.
The marriages of both the Childs and the
Powells were founded on true supportive love, something the film celebrates almost
as highly as it does fine dining. If there has been another constant companion
to French cuisine other than fine wine, after all, its love. Romance was Nora
Ephron’s field and in her best movies demonstrated an uncanny insight into the patience
and pains love sometimes requires. Her last film reinforces what she will be
best remembered as, a filmmaker well aware that love is not always easy, even
when it comes with the fringe benefits of French cuisine. But for the Powells
the Childs; it got them through.
