Movie
Julie & Julia
90
Rating: PG-13
Length: 2 hours, 3 minutes
Recipe(s) for success
Streep and Adams are perfect in summer confection
Posted: August 7, 2009 at 4:52 a.m.
Julia Child (Meryl Streep) discovers herself in '50s Paris in Nora Ephron's Julie & Julia.
LITTLE ROCK — Fresh and flavorful as a ripe peach, Julie & Julia is a sweet summer surprise. Who would expect to find a bright romantic comedy that's well written, wonderfully cast and charmingly executed in the over-boiled pot of cartoon characters, hung-over party boys, noisy animated toys, and busy wizards that dominate theaters from June through August?
Director and screenwriter Nora Ephron returns to top form (think When Harry Met Sally ..., not Bewitched) with Julie & Julia, a clever juxtaposition of two stories from two eras. They're tied together by two remarkable marriages and a lusty love of food. There are some ominous political echoes (McCarthyism in one, the Bush administration in the other) but these episodes aren't heavy-handed enough to bring down the film's ebullient spirit.
One story concerns Julia (Meryl Streep), a horsey, towering Pasadena native married to urbane diplomat Paul Child(Stanley Tucci) who's assigned to a post in Paris in the late 1940s. Searching for something to do there, she follows her passion for eating French food ("I'm so good at it!" she chortles to her husband) by attending the Le Cordon Bleu cooking school, where her talent allows her to beat the pants off the all-male class. Then she decides to collaborate with Parisians Simone "Simca" Beck and Louisette Bertholle on writing a French cookbook for Americans. The groundbreaking result: Mastering the Art of French Cooking, published in 1961.
The second story, set in 2002, concerns Julie Powell (Amy Adams), who lives above a pizzeria in Queens with her husband, Eric (Chris Messina). Despite early promise, 30-year-old Julie hasn't been able to get her dreamed-of writing career up and running and is a frustrated clerical worker in lower Manhattan, much to the amusement of her successful and condescending girlfriends.Eric suggests she seek fulfillment by starting a blog (they weren't so ubiquitous then). What to write about? Julie's eyes fall on a copy of Mastering the Art of French Cooking and decides to cook - and blog - her way through all of its 524 recipes over the course of 365 days.
Two women at loose ends make for lively comparisons. Ephron seamlessly switches from one decade to the other. Both characters are so different (big, braying Julia is somehow irresistible to the fickle Parisians, while pixie-pretty Julie sometimes rubs people, including her mother, the wrong way), yet so similar (both have supportive husbands and willingly take on an enormous challenge),that neither story stands out as superior to the other.
Streep is terrific as Julia, right down to the strange squawky voice, clomping stride, and total fearlessness in the kitchen and in social situations. Unlike many of Streep's roles in which she remains impregnably Meryl Streep no matter what accentor hairstyle she adopts, she instantly becomes Julia and never wavers. Tucci plays Paul with well-dressed sophistication and wit, an indulgent husband who, when his wife starts to make something of herself, is strong enough to delight in her success.
Adams' Julie is funny, pouty, driven and convincing, veering between zesty enthusiasm for her project and irritable aggravation at the difficulty of poaching an egg (harder than you think), moral quandaries (boiling live lobsters) and seemingly impossible tasks (boning a duck).
The confident tone of Julie & Julia allows it to enjoy itself without taking the easy way out on the ending. Even Ephron's efforts to cook up a way for 5-foot, 6-inch Streep to loom over everyone else (Child was 6 feet, 2 inches tall) come out just right.
MovieStyle, Pages 33, 38 on 08/07/2009
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