From One Woman to Another
Written: Sep 09 '09 (Updated Sep 12 '09)
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Product Rating:
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| Bang For The Buck |
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Pros: moving double-portrait adapted from two different memoirs
Cons: I can't think of any.
The Bottom Line: Ephron deserves an Oscar nom for adapting two memoirs so skillfully.
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| bilavideo's Full Review: Julie & Julia |
I don’t know what to say.
Julia Child was ninety-one years old when she died,
late yesterday, in her sleep.
It’s the death that all of us want, after a life so full
it would seem she was one of history’s true lucky souls,
if only luck had had anything to do with it.
She enriched the lives of thousands –
my life she quite literally turned around.
She died well-loved, and I hope she died well-fed.
There is no tragedy here.
It’s a day for remembrance, and celebration.
So why am I so f@#$ing sad?
--Julia Powell, Friday, August 13, 2004
Julie & Julia is a fairly simple story. Unsatisfied with her life, a New York woman decides to make a blog out of going through every recipe in Julia Child's famous cookbook, Mastering the Art of French Cooking. If that sounds about as exciting as a trip to Home Depot, you can thank a whole cast of characters for making sure it's not. Writer-director Nora Ephron adapted two books, Julie Powell's Julie & Julia and Julia Child's My Life in France, cross-pollinating the two to create two stories that work great as one. My wife dragged me to this one and, by the time it was done, I actually shed a tear, a reaction which puts me on probation with the He Man Woman-Haters Club. I got back at her next week by making her watch a movie with lots of explosions.
When we first meet her, Julie Powell (Amy Adams) is working the phonelines for the folks in charge of rebuilding Ground Zero. Her frustrations are amplified by friends (or frenemies) who are simply doing so much better, making so much more money, and achieving something with their lives she feels missing. When a friend (or frenemy) happily announces that Showtime has bought her blog, Julie complains to her husband, Eric (Chris Messina). His advice is to write her own blog. Reading Julia Child's memoirs, My Life in France (cowritten by Alex Prud'homme), Julia decides to start the Julie/Julia Project. Giving herself exactly one year to do it, Julie sets out to cook all 524 recipes in Julia Child's The Art of French Cooking.
What follows is a personal adventure, what Julie Powell would later title My Year of Cooking Dangerously. But that's only half the story. Of equal importance to Ephron is Julie's inspiration. Delving into the life of Julia Child (Meryl Streep), we find the wife of a State Department bureaucrat, Paul Child (Stanley Tucci). At a time when few respectable women worked outside the home, Julia (Streep) feels restless and unfulfilled. When she complains to Paul, he encourages her to find something she likes to do. When she says, "I like to eat," that becomes the start of story with twists and turns of its own.
How did Julia Child become this famous face in the world of cooking? For most of us who've been around long enough to remember her TV Show, The French Chef, she was always there. I grew up taking for granted that Julia Child was this Margaret Thatcher of the kitchen. That, of course, is not the way it was. Julie & Julia shows us a woman struggling to find her own way. Because of its focus on this pivotal moment, Ephron leaves out the earlier struggles and accomplishments of the real Julia Child. This is a woman who graduated from Smith College with a B.A. in English, worked for years in advertising and joined the Office of Strategic Services (forerunner of the CIA) after the bombing of Pearl Harbor. Nor was she just anybody at OSS. Julia Child worked in Washington, directly under General William J. Donovan, head of OSS. The jobs were typically clerical but they included the handling of high-level intelligence in places like Sri Lanka and China. The real Julia Child was a go-getter.
But that's not the story we have time for, and probably not the story that inspired Julie Powell. When we meet up Julia Child, the war is over and she is struggling to find something to do with herself, particularly now that women are being ushered back home so their husbands can have jobs to come home to. With no children to raise (Julia and Paul never had any), she was introduced to fine dining through her husband, Paul, who had lived in Paris before his assignment there by the State Department.
Ephron does a nice job of focusing on Julia during her struggling years. With Paul's blessing, she attends the world-famous Le Courdon Bleu cooking school where her frustrations are personalized by a character named Madame Brassart (Joan Juliet Buck) who scoffs at the pretensions of an American attempting to learn French cooking. In one scene, when she learns that Julia has joined the Cercle des Gourmettes and begins to teach French cooking to American housewives, she scoffs, "You have no talent for cooking. But the Americans won't know the difference." It's through the Cercle des Gourmettes that Julia meets Simone Beck and Louisette Bertholle (Linda Edmond and Helen Carey), who are looking to make a French cookbook for an American audience.
But there's more to this story, chapters best left to viewers. Suffice it to say that Julie & Julia shines a lot on the existential search for meaning in life, a struggle as real in one generation as the next, and one in which an answer here can inspire a creative act over there. The real strength of this film lies in the two lead performances. Streep's Julia embodies a strength bold enough to inspire the kind of need impassioned by Adams' Julie. Each reaches across the divide, with such passion that it's hard not to feel moved by it all. Another strength of the film is the way in which it shows the difference men can make in providing moral support. If these two husbands have anything in common, it's that each believes in his wife. It's probably not by accident that you never hear either of them say, "Edith, go get me my beer."
Recommended:
Yes
Movie Mood: Girl Movie
Viewing Method: Other
Film Completeness: Looked complete to me.
Worst Part of this Film: Nothing
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