A lumpy mix of Nora Ephron’s usual style of romantic-comedy, biopic, and that popular brand of pseudo-personal journalism that the Charlie Kaufman of Adaptation found so impossible to manhandle into workable cinematic form. Julie & Julia is adapted from the blog and subsequent book by Julie Powell about her own experiences as a 30-year-old would-be writer, Amherst grad, and general flibbertigibbet (played by Amy Adams), when she and her husband Eric (Chris Messina) move into an apartment over a Brooklyn pizzeria, and she takes a soul-deadening job dealing with victims of the 9/11 attacks applying for aid. Julie, nettled by her lack of success compared to her high-flying friends and especially after one of them uses her as a cautionary model in a scurrilous article on failing Gen X-ers, finds new purpose taking on a project whereby she maintains a blog chronicling her attempts to cook her way through the colossal tome “Mastering the Art of French Cooking” by her heroine Julia Child, a bible for gourmets. Julie’s experience is then compared through alternating flashbacks to Child’s (Meryl Streep) self-actualising odyssey, as a tall, garrulous late bloomer, teaching herself the arts of French cuisine when she and her diplomat husband Paul (Stanley Tucci) were residing in Paris in the early ‘50s, eventually roped into the efforts of her acquaintances Simone Beck (Linda Emond) and Louisette Bertholle (Helen Carey) to pen a book on French cuisine for American readers.
Infused with try-hard jauntiness in such a fashion that could be either intolerable or charming, given a viewer’s mood, by director Ephron, J&J offers a surprising amount of intimate detail in a film that is basically plotless, successfully contrasting the finer details of Child’s efforts to learn her craft, compose and sell her book, and deal with life problems ranging from her husband’s grilling by McCarthyite officials to sacking one of her less helpful co-authors, against Powell’s anxieties over her blog readership (i.e. does anyone read it? I relate!) and the general difficulties of negotiating an often bewildering and disconnected-feeling contemporary world. Child’s period tomboyish élan badly shows up Powell’s anxiety-riddled, often childish personality, most humorously contrasted in Child’s ruthless kitchen assaults on lobsters and onions, where Powell is freaked out by the springing lid of a pot full of crustaceans.
Ephron conjures a lucid warmth, and employs a clean, convincing feel for the details of both modern and ‘50s niche cultures, but struggles to leave behind the smug affectations of her earlier films, for the efforts to remain bouncy at all costs are finally tiresome in a work that is far too long. But there’s a certain depth in the film’s now-and-then counterpoint, the food looks good, and the pleasant acting carries it a long way. Streep’s ebullient, affected Child is one of her most lively and unforced performances in recent years, unlike her appalling turn in last year’s Doubt. Adams, whose innate variety of bug’s-ear cute could be toxic if bottled, fights to make Powell winsome enough to forgive her whininess, and Tucci and Messina are droll in playing that rarest of modern movie animals: decent husbands.
