In Julie & Julia, a frustrated temp secretary (Amy Adams) embarks on a year-long culinary quest to cook all 524 recipes in Julia Child's Mastering the Art of French Cooking. She chronicles her trials and tribulations in a blog that catches on with the food crowd. The film also covers the years Julia Child (Meryl Streep) and her husband Paul (Stanley Tucci) spent in Paris during the 1940s and 1950s, when he was a foreign diplomat who was eventually investigated by Sen. Joseph McCarthy for alleged communist ties.
Nora Ephron adapts Julie Powell's autobiographical book Julie and Julia: 365 Days, 524 Recipes, 1 Tiny Apartment Kitchen with this Columbia Pictures production starring Amy Adams as an amateur chef who decides to cook every recipe in a cookbook from acclaimed celebrity chef Julia Child (played by Meryl Streep) in order to chronicle it in a blog over the course of a year. Streep's Devil Wears Prada co-star Stanley Tucci re-teams with the actress as Child's husband. Certain movies are impossible to imagine without a particular actor. Star Wars without Harrison Ford’s cynical Han Solo? Pretty Woman minus Julia Roberts? Now Meryl Streep as Julia Child? Camera tricks allow Streep to tower over just about everybody in the Julia parts of the movie, including her character’s adoring husband, Paul (Stanley Tucci, suave and dry as fine French wine), a cultural affairs attaché stationed in Paris after World War II. Streep perfectly captures Child’s exuberant, big-boned sensuality, mischievous humor, and comically hooty voice. The couple met in wartime while working for the forerunner of the CIA, but in Paris, where the movie opens, Julia is just another State Department wife. “I need to dooo something,” she flutes mournfully before enrolling in an allmale class at the revered Cordon Bleu school. Mastering the Art of French Cooking, the classic 1961 cookbook that emerged from that experience, not only helped lay the foundation for generations of American foodies, but 40 years later freed another frustrated wife to follow her bliss. Powell (Adams), stuck in a dead-end job and unhappily relocated to Queens by her husband, Eric (Chris Messina), decides to cook all 524 recipes in a year and blog about it for Salon.com. Besides making you lust for a nice bifteck sauté béarnaise, the obstacles and mishaps the two J’s encounter are a ready source of hilarity. Finding Julia hacking away behind a mountain of sliced onions until she can chop as fast as her classmates, Paul covers his watering eyes and murmurs, “You’re being a little overcompetitive, don’t you think?” And a low-angle shot of Julie’s clowning response to a failed attempt at one of her role model’s recipes transcends the specific and achieves the universal: Supine on her kitchen floor, she is everywoman, felled by domesticity. But Julie & Julia is also a portrait of two relationships, and one fares better on-screen than the other. In their more serious scenes, Adams and Messina have no chemistry. Eric comes off as a bit of a bully, with Julie repeatedly deferring to his greater wisdom. And never mind that she’s serving him daily feasts; once her project takes off he becomes incensed by what he sees as her self-absorption. This could be interesting, except that Ephron’s intention is oddly unclear. Is he being a jerk? Is Julie? Would I like to see her dump a hot soufflé on his head? (Yes.) But would Ephron? Or are we meant to regard this as the inevitable push and pull of marriage?
In the end, it hardly matters. Ephron, whose most lauded screenplay until now was 1989’s When Harry Met Sally, is in her element with Julia and Paul. Their relationship is one of the movie’s joys. When Julia’s book is rejected by the original publisher or when Paul gets worked over by Cold War witch hunters in Washington, each comes home to a partner who not only understands and consoles, but also matters more than anything or anyone else in the world. Buoyed by humor and deliciously sexual, the Childs’ decades-long love affair feels utterly convincing, not least because Tucci and Streep capture the most elusive chemistry—that of people who are deeply intimate yet never lose their capacity to surprise each other. And all this plays out with a much more compelling realism than the romances in two of Ephron’s biggest hits, Sleepless in Seattle and You’ve Got Mail. Julie & Julia isn’t perfect, but it’s the Ephron movie that I’ve been waiting for—one as smart and vigorously alive as those legendary essays that put her on the map. This lovely movie gets a 4 on my "Go See" scale.
No comments:
Post a Comment