If you cut out half of Julie & Julia you’d wind up with a decent though short biopic. After watching Meryl Streep’s impressive performance as the giantess cooking legend Julia Child you’ll be left wondering why they didn’t just scrap the Julie half of the story and make a riveting and all-around fun biopic. But no, they got the film into production based on the dual-part book, so they couldn’t very much ditch Julie’s drab life once they discovered the half starring Streep and Stanley Tucci was so much more interesting. They should have.
Julie Powell (Amy Adams) doesn’t like her new apartment in Queens and with her job being nothing more than a complaint box for publicity at Ground Zero, she needs something to occupy her mind. Her hubby Eric (Chris Messina) makes an off-hand suggestion to start a food blog and suddenly Julie energizes full of new purpose. That’s it! She’ll start a blog charting her progress as she works her way through Julia Child’s own tome on French cooking for the American chef. With five hundred-some recipes and 365 days to go, Julia begins cooking with a vengeance. As the days turn to weeks and then months, she finds her blog growing in popularity and public prestige. Soon enough she has fans sending her gifts and editors sending her interview offers – Julie has made it as a writer.
Intercut between Julie’s success are the trials of Julia Child as she overcomes gender role prejudices in the Parisian echelons of cooking. Julia excels where many training chefs fail and soon begins teaching with two other women with aspirations of writing a cookbook not far off. Writing a cookbook seems to be harder than any of them thought however, and it only gets further complicated when Julia’s husband Paul gets a diplomatic reassignment in light of the McCarthy proceedings back in the states. Julia’s tale twists and turns with the marriage of her sister (Jane Lynch) and multiple rewrites of their book. The story unravels and, even though you know how it ends, the story remains quite compelling for being a glorified biopic surrounded by food porn.
Julie & Julia marks the first time Amy Adams has failed to enamor me with her acting; but it’s really not her fault. As a character, Julie is near impossible to like as she becomes increasingly manic and self-involved. The blog seems to become a literary blob eating everything in her life and spitting it out. Her relationship with her husband suffers and her obsessive need for public recognition finds easy measurement in her self-celebratory tracking of blog comments. Her story rose to the top of blog-turned-book stories that helped to spur on the “everyone’s got a blog” era, and consequently it’s considered as valid a story as Child’s. But it’s not.
It should come as no surprise to the casual moviegoer that Streep overshadows almost all else the film has to offer – save for Stanley Tucci. Together, the two make an incredible couple (so much that it makes you take a second glance at their pairing in The Devil Wears Prada) and the story of Paul and Julia Child genuinely affects. While Julie’s story is one of self-indulgence and ego, Julia’s tells of willpower and a true love of cooking, not cooking for the sake of a commitment to a blog. It’s a hideously distasteful sandwich of a film in that the truly great aspect of the story is crammed between the lesser and meaningless tale of Julie. To make matters worse, Julia becomes a villain of sorts by the film’s end when her disapproval of Julie’s blog causes our modern-day protagonist a small bit of insecurity. And here’s where the message gets somewhat saccharine.
Sitting on their bed, Eric tells Julie that she shouldn’t worry about what the real Julia thinks, but of the Julia in her head, the one who inspired her all this time. I’m sorry, but if the person whose work you claim to have lived by thinks your work is distasteful – then yeah, you did something wrong. Julia saw the self-indulgent streak in Julie that wasn’t so exposed until this film. And Julia is right, Julie used her; used her story; used her life; used her struggle to enhance her own which is woefully undeserving of the silver screen treatment.
But hey, at least we get terrific performances from Meryl Streep and Stanley Tucci.
"Julie & Julia" opens August 7, 2009 and is rated PG13. Biopic, Comedy, Drama. Directed by Nora Ephron. Written by Julie Powell (book), Nora Ephron (screenplay). Starring Amy Adams, Jane Lynch, Mary Lynn Rajskub, Meryl Streep, Stanley Tucci, Chris Messina.
