Overall Rating: A−
Filmmaking/Artistic: A
Storytelling: B+
MPAA Rating: PG-13 (Rare coarse language, some “sensuality”)
The pitch
Imagine that old Saturday Night Live sketch where Julia Child gushes blood all over the chicken, but no blood and we’ll get Meryl Streep to do Julia’s accent. Oh yeah, and we’ll get Nora Ephron to write it and we’ll add a modern heroine straight out of a Lifetime movie to get the chicks to come, but we’ll keep Meg Ryan out so their husbands can tolerate it.
Overview
A very life affirming movie about Julia Child, with a very Hollywood version of a modern woman thrown in. It’s a nice look a couple who clearly loved each other and loved life, and who changed the face of cooking in America.
Full review
Julie & Julia is a movie in 3 parts. One part is the story of Julia Child in Paris (and then later in Cambridge, MA) as she first discovers that culinary experience and goes on to write the seminal book Mastering the Art of French Cooking. The second part is the modern hook, a young, whiny New Yorker named Julie Powell who is depressend in her job and her new Queens, NY apartment, and decides to cook through Mastering (all 500+ recipes) in one year, and blog about it. (This is in 2002, when blogs were first beginning.) And the third part is the food–beautifully shot French food cooked by both Julie and Julia.
The Julia part is as heartwarming as any story presented on film. Julia and her husband Paul, who works for the foreign service in Pairs, are completely in love, and enjoy every minute they spend together. Julia is a tall, quirky, and very self-assured as she conquers many obstacles. She enrolls in a very male-dominated cooking school, where the female director (or head administrator) clearly hates her, and tells her many times that she has no discernible talent for cooking. Julia rises above all this, and ends up by chance meeting Simone (Simca) Beck at a party, who happens to be writing a French cookbook for English audiences. This becomes a labor of love for Julia, whose unflappable spirit prevails, and even though many audience members know the ending (clearly, she’s going to get the book published and eventually become a household name in the US), it’s still wonderful to watch.
The food is also a star. From Julia’s first bite of an unbelievably butter fish in Paris, to Julie’s gorgeous creations from her tiny Queens kitchen, the sumptuous creations are definitely a co-star. Your Movie Monkey has read that all the food was real, cooked on stage. However they accomplished it, it’s a great treat… some have even called it food porn.
The third part of the movie is less entertaining and slightly less watchable. The modern Julie comes across as, well, modern but certainly quite whiny. Her husband seems a complete cartoon.. you know the type — dark, handsome, of a somewhat slight build so as to be non-threatening. He lives to support his somewhat snotty bride in her quest, and the one time he does blow up briefly at her for being so self-absorbed, he comes back after a day and esssentially realizes that he was wrong in not putting his entire life on hold in support of her project and moods.
Interestingly, Your Movie Monkey’s wife Beaudelaire, who read the book before seeing the movie, claimed that the movie actually made Julie far nicer than she appeared in reading the book. Beaudelaire claimed that, while she quite enjoyed the idea of cooking through Julia’s book in a year, she found Julie Powell’s writing so coarse that it was a difficult read. In fact, one of Your Movie Monkey’s co-workers told him that she refused to see the movie after reading the book. For more info regarding this, follow the links in the blog entry by Maki Koitoh.
Despite the kind of potato-skin-with-extra-colby-jack appetizer of the story of Julie, the entree of Julia in Paris makes this movie an enjoyable. Meryl Streep is absolutely dead on with her imitation of Julia Child, and Stanley Tucci gives a subtle performance as her husband Paul. Amy Adams as Julie and Chris Messina as her husband Eric provide good performances given the material they had to work with.
