“Julie and Julia”: My Review
Julie Powell, who wrote the book (of the same title) upon which Nora Ephron’s upcoming (August 7th; trailer here) movie is largely based, had the temerity to put her name in the title before God’s. God, for those of you who aren’t religious in the culinary sense, means Julia Child. The deity’s representative on earth in this movie is Meryl Streep, and I have to say that her impersonation is pretty apt. The Expert in Accents has obviously spent a lot of time studying La Julia’s vocal patterns, in particular the tendency to swoop up toward the adjectives. (“Last night, I had the most MAR-velous roast chicken!†) Meryl isn’t nearly as tall as Julia was, and Ephron has compensated by casting Stanley Tucci as her husband. And of course La Streep is padded, since you can’t be besotted by butter for decades and stay anorexic. Streep pretty much owns this movie, and long after you’ve stopped chuckling over her vocal imitations you’re still chortling over her bits of comic business. She is one of the screen’s great comediennes, a fact that was forgotten for too long but restored by her quietly wicked Miranda Priestley in “The Devil Wears Prada.â€
As in “Prada,†Meryl must share the mic with an ambitious young New Yorker on her way up. In “Julie and Julia,†it’s Julie Powell, the real-life struggling writer who in 2002 launched a blog in which she cooked her way through all the recipes in Child’s masterpiece “Mastering the Art of French Cooking.†Julie is played with perfect adequacy by Amy Adams, who was Streep’s junior nunnie in “Doubt.†Although Julie’s story runs in quite seamless parallel to Julia’s – in 1950s Paris, Julia works her way toward getting a first book together, just as in Queens, New York, Julie crafts a blog with an eye toward publication between hard covers – there is, as the movie glides along, too schematic a sense of the story unfolding. I started checking my watch about halfway through.
Still, given the flavorless movies Ephron has made lately (a second helping of “Bewitched,†anyone?), “Julie and Julia†is quite tasty. Ephron has been a card-carrying foodie for many moons (speaking of card-carrying, there is some unexpected yet welcome political argument in this picture), and has written witty books (“Heartburnâ€) and essays about the joy of cooking. If “Julie and Julia†has at times a superficial, uptown-Manhattan sensibility (a narrowly circumscribed world where the ultimate honor is getting profiled in the New York Times), this picture was obviously for Ephron a labor of love. Bon appétit!
