Movie Time! Julie & Julia

Julie & Julia puts the wonderful Meryl Streep into the shoes of Julia Child, the famously warm and down to earth American chef with her own cooking show on tele­vision.  The film is the vessel for a great narrative and an excellent perfor­mance from Ms. Streep.  But as enjoyable as it was, there were some glaring flaws.

The story is really an amalgam of two stories. We follow Julie Powell (Amy Adams), a government worker stag­nating in her cubicle, slowly approaching her thir­tieth birthday as she watches her friends swoop past her with their high-powered careers. Her friend’s venture into the world of blogging compels her to pursue her own blog. Julie decides that she will cook her way through Julia Child’s (Meryl Streep) cookbook of 524 recipes in one year. By the end of her journey, she becomes discovered by the New York Times and publishes her own book.

The movie tries to establish Julie’s life as a loose reflection of Julia Child’s life. Julia Child climbs her way from government clerk-turned housewife to author of a cookbook. Julie’s story starts off with a strong energy and estab­lishes a solid base of emotion that explains what could motivate her to adhere to such a disci­plined regimen of cooking. But later, the emotional momentum seems to taper off and we’re left with what seems to mostly a straight­forward narrative account.

Because Julie and Julia doesn’t have any particular cine­mato­graphic merits, the attention is focused primarily on the narra­tives. The two stories are quite hopeful and enter­taining. But they fall flat in terms of an emotional payoff. Julie’s triumph that comes in the form of her book deal doesn’t seem to be all that rewarding. Julia Child’s story is far more inter­esting and holds us in a para­doxical suspense: we already know that she achieves fame, yet we want to see exactly how she got there. Julie on the other hand is not a very inter­esting character.

It seems as if the screen­writer was more inter­ested in creating a biog­raphy delivered in an enter­taining format. It doesn’t quite achieve any dramatic break­throughs. I found the attempted allu­sions to Julie and Julia’s lives to be weak and unin­ter­esting. There is nothing profound about the simi­lar­ities between their lives. It is perhaps serendip­itous, but certainly nothing to write home about. I could easily make my life seem rather similar to any number of my personal heroes.

Then there’s Eric Powell, Julie’s husband. About an hour and twenty minutes into the movie, the seem­ingly happy couple have a major breakdown out of nowhere. Eric starts ranting about how the blog has turned her into a narcissist and proceeds to storm out of their apartment.At no point did we see any particular stressor to this scene.We never see any of this tension building up. In fact, in the previous scene, the two were laughing heartily at a parody on tele­vision. Eric is portrayed as unsup­portive, sarcastic, and essen­tially a prick. It is entirely unchar­ac­ter­istic and unfounded. How it happened in real life is irrel­evant: from a screen­writing perspective, it’s sloppy. Another point of slop­piness appears near the end. The movie makes no attempt to explain why Julia Child does not care for Julie’s blog. It seemed to be a little extra­neous detail. It feels like the screen­writer just decided to throw in bits and pieces of the real account out of whimsy.

I expected to see how Julia Child affected Julie Powell’s life in a profound way. Instead, the movie is essen­tially nothing more than an enter­taining and well-structured amalgam of two different lives in two different times. The two stories weren’t tightly woven enough to make a compelling whole. This isn’t to say that the movie wasn’t enjoyable. Meryl Streep’s perfor­mance is a joy to behold, and seeing her 5’6″ frame appear as a signif­i­cantly taller 6’2″ is an enjoyable illusion to entertain. And although the task of weaving two narra­tives together is no small feat, the movie would have done better if it focused on either story rather than both. I personally left wanting to see Julia Child’s ascension to iconic home-stay of the domestic life, but I guess Julie & Julia will suffice.