BOOKS AND ARTS AUGUST 6, 2009
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“Repeat after me,” Julia Child’s husband tells her in the opening moments of Julie & Julia. “Nous cherchons un bon restaurant Francais.” “Repeat after me,” Julie Powell’s husband tells her a few minutes later, “Nine hundred square feet.” This is the distance between the film’s homonymic protagonists, between the palatial Parisian flat in which Child began writing her seminal Mastering the Art of French Cooking in the 1950s, and the dingy apartment above a Queens pizza parlor in which Powell began blogging her way through its 524 recipes in 2002.
Julie & Julia is, of course, less interested in economic differences than in what it perceives to be spiritual similarities--two women, half a century apart, who reinvent themselves, find meaning and self-confidence in the kitchen, and ultimately achieve fame and fortune. But as these two interwoven stories unspool, viewers may find themselves struck more and more by just how superficial the parallels are. Child and her coauthors, Simone Beck and Louisette Bertholle, revolutionized American cuisine; Powell wrote a blog for Salon.com that she subsequently adapted into a book. Child was a woman of unassailable enthusiasm and world-historical gregariousness; Powell, at least as portrayed in the film, was moody and self-absorbed. Child had a joyous, openly romantic marriage; Powell had a fraught one (indeed, ultimately more fraught even than the film conveys: Her second book, due out in December, describes the extramarital affair in which she indulged following the publication of the first). Julia Child, in short, is a hugely worthy subject for a biographical film; Julie Powell, no offense, is not.
As a result, Julie & Julia, written and directed by Nora Ephron, is a radically unbalanced undertaking. The Child portions of the film, in which Meryl Streep gives what may be the wittiest and most charming performance of her career, are a sheer delight. Streep neatly captures the outsized Child mannerisms that, for those of us born before 1970, approach the texture of genetic memory. But unlike, say, Cate Blanchett’s Hepburn impersonation in The Aviator, Streep’s performance evokes the underlying spirit as well: effervescent yet indomitable, a radical traditionalist. Child’s rapture at her first bite of haute cuisine, a beautifully browned sole meuniere, is palpable; her subsequent culinary exhilarations (“French people eat French food every. single. day. I can’t believe it,” she gushes) are utterly contagious. And though Streep is at least a half-foot shorter than Child’s vertiginous 6’2”, Ephron uses a Peter Jacksonesque array of effects and angles to enhance her apparent altitude, and Streep mimics expertly her vaudevillian carriage.
As her husband, Paul, Stanley Tucci offers his customary wry wit but also a deeper reservoir of tenderness than he has generally been called on to display. Indeed, Julia and Paul’s marriage is among the most appealing portraits of the institution since Nick and Nora Charles teased their way through six murder films in the 1930s and ’40s. The Childs are mutually devoted and supportive, yes, but also committedly carnal, whether it’s Julia’s description of the lunch and “naps” with which the couple filled her midday breaks from Cordon Bleu training, or Paul’s feisty translation of a tricky French recipe: “Bathe the thighs in butter and then stuff the hen…. until she just can’t take it any more.” I won’t even relay the obscene simile Child deploys to describe the firmness and heat of boiled manicotti, but it’s enough to make Judd Apatow blush. The couplings of this giddy giantess and her bald, bespectacled hubby will probably do more for sex in America than all the frictionless collisions of aerobicized abs that Hollywood inflicts upon us for the next decade.
And yet, like clockwork, every ten minutes or so we’re pulled away from the midcentury chronicles of Julia and Paul for another installment of Julie Powell’s infatuation with Julie Powell. It is Ephron’s good fortune that she shanghaied Amy Adams--an actress so irresistible that she briefly brought even the Night at the Museum sequel to life--into the role, and for a while she keeps the character afloat above her unhappy particulars: the job she hates, fielding post-9/11 complaints for the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation; the bitch-caricature friends who ostentatiously lament her lack of success; the marriage into which she seems disinclined to put much effort (Chris Messina is cast in the thankless role of husband Eric). This is all supposed to change once Powell decides to blog her way through every recipe in Child’s magnum opus--and, in a sense, it does. She now has something she is doing for herself that can override her obligations to anyone else: a fake sick day here, a neglected hubby there. As she explains at one point to her better half (and, in this case, he really is her better half), “Okay, maybe I’m being a little narcissistic. … What do you think blogs are? It’s about me, me, me.” Even the endlessly exaggerated terms in which she describes what Child’s example means to her--“she saved my life”--ring less as genuine gratitude than as an ongoing drama of the self.
I don’t know what led to the delusion that this latter tale would elevate the former, that we’d better appreciate the woman who composed the recipes if we also spent time with a woman who followed them, but the whole enterprise has a whiff of marketing to it. Did the filmmakers worry that Child wouldn’t be “relatable” to contemporary women? Was there a fear that the 18-35 demographic would decline to show up if it didn’t have an onscreen representative? Whatever the cause, I left Ephron’s film hungry for another helping of Julia Child, but with the queasy sensation that I’d been fed more Julie Powell than could comfortably be digested.
Christopher Orr is a senior editor of The New Republic.
29 comments
Thanks, Chris. I'd been toying with the idea of seeing this film, because even in a 45-second trailer Meryl Streep's Julia Child is winning, but figured that the framing story of the blogger would ultimately sink it for me. Glad to have my impressions confirmed before I wasted eight bucks on it -- maybe I'll wait for it to come out in a medium I can fast-forward through.
- austinexpat
August 7, 2009 at 8:29am
Nice idea, shame about the director! That should tell you what (not) to expect...
- Michael Fishberg
August 7, 2009 at 10:43am
I feel for Ms Powell. She must have cringed when she realized the closing minutes of her 15 would be spent in the umbra of Meryl Streep.
- gwolfjr
August 7, 2009 at 10:44am
Nice idea, shame about the director. That should give you an indication of what (not) to expect. It should have been called
- michael
August 7, 2009 at 10:56am
I have read any number of reviews saying the same thing, and I believe it. I was aware of Julie Powell's effort, and the woman leads a whiny life. I, too, am probably waiting for DVD so I can ff through the bloat. But I wonder what would have happened if Ephron had made a straightforward Child bio? Perhaps it's the contrast with a fairly typical modern, neurotic, mess that makes Child's life so much more appealing. Maybe the movie isn't so much a celebration of Child as a reproach of Powell and her ilk.
- jmkerr
August 7, 2009 at 11:09am
This judgment of the film seems to match what one expects from the trailer -- Streep nails it; the modern-day parts look highly forgettable; and at the end of the trailer one is frustrated that there wasn't more Streep in it. So I too will be skipping this, at least until I can select scenes in the comfort of my own home. Bonus points if I can borrow it for free from the public library.
- frippo
August 7, 2009 at 11:19am
I think you're all being unfair. After all, it was Julie Powell's blog and subsequent book that created interest in making this film. Julia Child, bless her, isn't exactly front page news.
- jblum8156
August 7, 2009 at 2:32pm
Having not seen it, I can only guess that it's the contrast that makes the movie. And guess that it's the unspoken woof that makes its way through the warp provided by the contrasting Julia and Julie -- the woof being Irma Starkloff Rombauer and her seminal book, The Joy of Cooking. As I understand the concept of the movie, Julia and Julie each enjoy cooking, but on different levels and in different times and in different ways for different reasons. But for each, it's a joy. As for the Julia character being more enjoyable than the Julie character, no doubt that is intentional and apparently reflective of the two real-life personalities. So what? It's the contrast that is important to many movies. I didn't care for two of the three principal characters in Rashomon, but that didn't keep me from enjoying a movie that is famous for its contrasting characters. Or make me wish that I would have waited to see it at home on TV when I first saw it in an art-cinema theater back in the early 1960s. Bon appetit, y'all.
- Joe B.
August 7, 2009 at 3:20pm
Sure, Chris, me and my boys are going to a chick flick tonight . . . looking forward to the Streep doing another spot on accent...I heard she's on helium this time so she get's it just right, nails it. . . Not! What we're doing we're staying home, in the house, mf! Got some fresh buds, and sweet baby jesus, USPS just delivered our Netflix order, Yentl, dude. Party's on. How 'bout ya'll? Come on over.
- hookvillekid
August 7, 2009 at 4:30pm
I just saw the movie and completely loved it. I thought the movie was fun, touching, and clever, and I never once wished I could fast forward through it. It's a wonderful way to spend two hours and both Meryl Streep and Amy Adams were perfect for their characters. Lighten up - it's a chick flick and it delivers!
- ppw
August 7, 2009 at 10:37pm
I read Powell's book and fell in love with her candor and self-effacement. She's writing about a crossroads in her life, and so is of course self-absorbed. Is Julia's "My Life in France" less so? Is any memoir? And I would have preferred, as charming as Meryl's Julia is, to have the film focus on the dark humor of Powell's life as depicted in the book. Amy Adams seems woefully miscast. Is she to be Meg Ryan 2.0? Can we see her surviving life in Queens for more than 5 min.? I wish the part would have gone to a talented, hardier unknown and that Ephron would have tried to plumb Powell's book for the true feeling that is has. Instead she settles for lobster sight gags. If there are flaws in the movie, I find them to be entirely Ephron's and not Julie Powell's.
- Thalia
August 8, 2009 at 10:14pm
Maybe I'm getting soft, but I just saw the movie tonight and also completely loved it, and I'm not even a chick. Some of the appraisals of the Amy Adams chracter strike me as way too harsh. She's adorable and sympathetic. No, her project is not of the scale or significance of Child's. That point is obvious, and I don't think the movie, even with its clever parallels, is suggesting otherwise. However, the project is of great significance to *her*, and I didn't begrudge her her moments of frustration or her victory. She wants to get published -- to be a writer -- and she manages to do that. Well, good for her. Her book wouldn't interest me. For that matter, neither would Child's! (I'm not a cook.) And, for all I know, the real Julie Powell is insufferable. But the Amy Adams version, as you would expect if you like Amy Adams as I do, is perfectly charming. I thought the narrative structure was ingenious and allowed the movie to avoid, or at least mitigate, the usual problem with biopics, which is the lack of plot. (People's actual lives tend not to fit neatly into a screenplay without a very large and apparent shoehorn.) What unites the two women and makes the story appealing even to male non-cooks such as myself, is not as much a love of cooking as a desire to leave a mark. Neither is content merely to cook. Both want to write about it and get themselves published. The joy and release that both women portray when they've made it in that regard is palpable and universal, even if Child's mark will turn out to be considerably larger than Powell's. For me, that disparity was made up fro in, if not the "relatability," then, at least, the proximity of the Powell character. p.s. Thanks for the link to the review of the Thin Man movies. Yes, that's an excellent comparison. Streep and Tucci went together like Powell and Loy, like, I can only assume, Orr and Cottle.
- jhildner
August 8, 2009 at 11:48pm
Just saw the film- fantastic. Perhaps the homage to Child isn't just for what she achieved herself, but for the influence she has over a young, somewhat aimless and restless woman, in 2002. That itself is testament to the enduring power of her life and work. To me, it's not important to dissect and compare the validity of Julie vs. Julia's course or motivations. It is the impact of JC's work and persona, even if filtered through a young woman in the 21st century, that rang true. I think that may have been the point. It was delicious through and through and I would recommend seeing it in a theater (rather than waiting for the DVD), as the Parisian mood and the food scenes are so much richer, satisfying and tangible.
- EAA
August 8, 2009 at 11:54pm
Hey Netflix generation, Get off your mental butts... How can a simple review from any two-bit NR commentator on a movie actually persuade you to see or not see it or believe anything he says? Did you sell your brains to Netflix too? Why do you folks have a problem shelling out under $10 (are these the new New Republic readership?...)? Why do you folks have a self-imposed time limit with which you can watch a film? Do you cut and splice your life too? It took you longer to find the review on the web and actually read it than the time you have to see the film. Losers..
- PeterK
August 9, 2009 at 1:40am
Hey,Chris Orr, lighten up. Both women excel in their leading roles, as do their amazingly supportive husbands. The script is wonderful. The pacing moves the film from one high to another. In sum, a thoroughly delightful flick for which, I'll wager, Streep will win the Academy Award for Best Actress.
- markarn
August 9, 2009 at 7:40am
I too saw the flick last night and just adored it! I just had to get up this morning and make crepes with a fresh blueberry and cointreau sauce (and a tad of sour cream ) plus a fresh from my garden leek and herb omelette for my dear husband and I! Maybe you naysayers, who have not even seen the movie should take your other half out to see this flick and you might have an absolutely glorious morning ( or evening) yourself!
- slf
August 9, 2009 at 2:40pm
saw this this weekend and there are two problems with going back and forth between julie and julia's lives: one you mention here: julia child's life is/was much more interesting, indeed, infatuating. the other you don't: streep and tucci are such superior actors to adams and messina that the film deflates each time it features them and the pedestrian lives they portray.
- edgar
August 9, 2009 at 5:16pm
I am not sure why but I kind of wish this had been a second Streep/Emily Blunt pairing. I have yet to see the movie but as many posters have noted it seems like a movie that requires two strands. Streep or no Streep, a Julia Child only movie would be like those respectable biopics that make out way every season. Its really immensely boring to whine on about bloggers and their narcissism and so on. The woman did cook Child's recipes and as someone here said made Child accessible for a new generation.
- Shama
August 9, 2009 at 8:52pm
OK, yeah, yeah. The Julia moments were far more engaging than the Julie moments. But a diplomatic life in a Parisian mansion, hob-nobbing with the intellectual elite is far more engaging than a one room apartment above a pizzeria in Brooklyn. Even Julia said she could NEVER go back to her secretarial job. Julie was annoying and a whiner and self-involved, but Julia had her moments, too. If you remember, Paul came home worrying about whether he'd have a job; Julia listend for a minute, then started complaining about the book. The point is the transformational power not only of cooking, but of food as act of communion. Julie (and Julia) grow through feeding others and pushing their boundaries. Even if Julie whines a lot in the process.
- Jeri Hurd
August 9, 2009 at 9:34pm
I disagree with Mr. Orr's assessment that the film is out of balance both because of the differing weightiness in the real-life character's lives and because Streep's performance outweigh's Adam's. After seeing the film, I think that both Ephron and the actresses have done a splendid job--Ephron in crafting a script that connects these two characters, and the actresses in each depicting a believable and charming person. It is undeniable that Julia Child is a historically important person and that Julie Powell is not. That doesn't matter in the context of this film, which is, after all, not a biographical documentary. In 1975, at age 20, I married a sophisticated food- and-wine loving older man. I was a non-cook at the time. I taught myself to cook from Mastering (and Julia's other volumes, especially From Julia Child's Kitchen). Julia helped me enter my new life with a confidence that I could not have achieved any other way. Decades of table guests--and my husband--have had reason to be grateful for Julia's teaching, too.
- Kathleen Pavelko
August 10, 2009 at 10:13am
"A reproach of Powell and her ilk"... that was the effect the movie had on me. One can't help but think of hip hop music which can only reuse snippets of other peoples music to make money, rather than create anything original themselves. But was the director thinking of that, or merely using Powell's character to bring in the 18 to 35 crowd that another person suggested for marketing purposes? My regret is that an in depth biographical movie of Child's life and marriage was not even attempted. I am tired of seeing larger than life great people trivialized, as if masterfully capturing their mannerisms and speech patterns was enough... what a waste of great material and fine actors.
-
August 10, 2009 at 10:29am
I think it's very interesting that most of the people who agree with this review haven't seen the film. I saw it and I thought it was thoroughly entertaining and very funny -- just what I look for in a summer flick. Stanley Tucci's marvelous.
- Meredith
August 11, 2009 at 3:44pm
The picture is well worth seeing. Ultimately, it is the contrast between the lives of Child and Powell that makes the movie work. [It isn't perfect, but it's rewarding in ways far beyond that the film's trailer and Christopher Orr's review might suggest.] Streep is altogether wonderful as Child. But I am puzzled by the review's mention of Cate Blanchett's disastrous Katharine Hepburn in THE AVIATOR. Why bring up such an albatross? Blanchett's portrayal of Hepburn in the Scorsese film was one of the least convincing depictions of a public figure in a major movie in many years -- right down there with Jon Voight's FDR in PEARL HARBOR and James Brolin's Clark Gable in GABLE AND LOMBARD.
- Griff
August 12, 2009 at 12:59pm
Orr, did you and I see the same film? Did you even see the film? I've read both Child's memoir and Powell's book as well as seen the picture -- and enjoyed all. I think Ephron did as well as might be expected in trying to meld two stories into one within a roughly 2-hour time frame. Yes, Powell is whiny -- but she's a product of the '90s. What do you expect?
- Marc
August 12, 2009 at 1:03pm
The reviews stating the movie should be just on Julia Child are missing the point. The movie is based on a book/blog that was genius by Julie Powell. It is not based on a book by Julia Child. And far more people can relate to struggling to survive and find a way to live your passion - than the other life where one is swept away to live in Paris and attend Le Cordon Bleu without a worry of how to finance it. The movie was true to the book it was based on: Julie and Julia. And it was very entertaining and both stories are compelling and inspiring. If someone else wants to do a movie on just Julia Child - let them. If it weren't for Julie Powell no one would be talking about Julia Child as much as they are right now or buying her books.
- kerry
August 12, 2009 at 1:30pm
My book club read the Julie Powell book, and we all just hated her - all except the one twenty-something in the group. She didn't find Powell self-centered at all. Perhaps the film is designed to appeal to that younger demographic. I loved the movie. Meryl Streep gave an amazing performance. I want to see it again.
- Nelda Mohr
August 12, 2009 at 5:51pm
My wife and I saw "Julie and Julia" together with three of our grandchildren, ages 13 to 17. The film is long, but no one got bored. Meryl Streep's marvelous acting nevertheless needed some counterpoint to the grating voice and over-the-top mannerisms of the real Julia. Amy Powell supplied that in full. Frankly, a full biography of Julia minus the more believable story of her self-appointed acolyte would have lacked the drama needed for a successful film. Furthermore, anyone under the age of 65 is unlikely to have personally shared the hey-day of Julia Child's transformation of American cuisine. It took Julie's growing love for Julia to bring new life to a familiar character.
- Philip R. Alper
August 13, 2009 at 2:38am
I agree with those (relatively few) people who disagreed with the reviewer, and who thoroughly enjoyed the movie -- both Juli's. I want to add my opinion that society, and people in it (in particular, people in authority), is/are very apt to view people, in particular women, as being "selfish" -- in particular, when they try to get out of a situation which is unhealthy and/or abusive, and when they work on themSELVES. I've said elsewhere that "selfish" could be thought of as "self-ish", a "word" I coin to mean very aware of the self. "The self" could be MYself, or Julie's self -- or an OTHER-self. As I watched the movie, I saw Julie and her husband as a "cute" young married couple -- younger by at least ten years than JuliA and her husband. So of course they were less mature -- and poorer, as has already been pointed out. Also, they were different people, of course; the same in many respects, as brought out in the movie, but of course not the same in all respects. Both Juli's were self-ish in the sense that I've mentioned. Again, it seems to me that when a woman tries to (and succeeds) protect herself, or otherwise work on herself, she is seen as "selfish" or "self-centered". I did not view Julie P. in this way at all -- she was simply being "self-ish" during the period covered by the film. (As for her second book, about her subsequent affair, we should all wait to read that book before judging her.) I was what I called an abused spousal care giver for many years and decades. But I was always aware that the abuser was not my spouse; it was society, who expected and allowed me to, for example, go without sleep -- that's an exaggeratiion, but I was awakened every two, or one and a half, hours to attend to my husband's needs. (Again, that wasn't his fault; if you have an itch or a painful spasm, it must be attended to.) I wrote a book about the seven years during which all this reached its peak -- "Dirty Details: The Days and Nights of a Well Spouse" (Temple University Press). My editor was well aware that his board of directors, and later readers and reviewers, might call me "selfish" for (A) writing about the effect on ME (and our four young children) of my husband's multiple sclerosis and (B) eventually insisting that my husband live in a nursing home. So my editor and I took every precaution, in the book, that this happen to a minimum. We included a chapter about our marriage pre-M.S., the good things that we shared, etc., and we made sure that it was made clear that I did indeed do all this care giving -- day and night -- without ever abusing my husband (only having tantrums sometimes). And indeed, that book got only one bad review (two, if you count the one of Amazon), in which I was dubbed "selfish". (The other reviews were appropriately humble in the face of what my family and I went through.) Again, the reason that I was "selfish" was that I protected myself -- and the four children (one of whom also "did nights with Dad" -- his idea -- because he saw the logistic that, without sleep, I would not be able to function for very long, nor would I be happy). When I was on Radio Times, only one negative-towards-me person called in, a male nurse, who commented, "it seems to me that what she's saying is "poor me". I answered, "No, what I'm saying is poor EVERYBODY in this situation." In fact, the reason that I published "Dirty Details" was so that people in my situation could identify their situation (according to each individual circumstance) and, if need be -- or WHEN need be -- get out of it. Back to Julie Powell: (a) In ANY marriage, there are probably periods when the couple makes love less frequently, or perhaps not at all -- according to individual needs and perhaps according to dynamics in the marriage itself, and (b) if Julie had NOT attended to her needs, it probably would have been worse for the marriage that when she did. At any rate, there were forces on Julie -- well described, I think, by her -- that caused her to live as she did, and eventually she and her husband did indeed work it out (as least in the movie). I have said elsewhere that "all women are in danger of becoming care givers". Now I'm saying that all women are in danger of being called "selfish" -- and it's probably true that all PEOPLE are in danger of being called "selfish". Again, my main point is that I believe that we need to be careful about calling people "selfish"; we need to consider that being self-ish -- aware of the self -- is very important, and healthy -- for EVERYBODY in our lives' selves, not only our own selves.
- Marion.D.Cohen
August 13, 2009 at 11:08am
Thanks Marion for the insights. I agree. The only ways in which Powell was selfish in the movie were that, while doing this project and also working a 9-5 job, she missed one day of work and didn't give her husband a lot of loving or, we understand, adequate attention generally. Well, you know, that sort of thing is common, hardly the end of the world, and understandable in context. Besides, as you point out, she saw the (minor) error of her ways. I was surprised by the verdict that she was "selfish" or, as the guy in The Onion put it, "monstrously self-centered." Monstrously? Really? Maybe she comes off worse in her book, but I didn't see it in the movie. Remember, Julia didn't have a day job. I suppose that if you're not sympathetic to Julie's project, you would find her dedication to it odd. I don't know. As I said, I personally wouldn't have been interested in her blog. But I found its importance to her convincing and sympathetic.
- jhildner
August 13, 2009 at 3:06pm