Julie & Julia (***½)

Directed by: Nora Ephron

Starring: Amy Adams, Meryl Streep, Stanley Tucci, Chris Messina

Seen: December 15^th 2009

***½ Out of ****

In the 1950’s, Julia Child (Streep) went to Paris with her husband Paul (Tucci), who was a diplomat for the American government in France at the time. While Paul was there for work, Julia took a while to really find something to live for, and this something turned out to be French cooking. She later became famous for her book Mastering the Art of French Cooking (in collaboration with two French women, Simone Beck and Louisette Bertholle), which she wrote to give the English speaking world an opportunity to learn French cooking. It was also at the time the only cookbook of its kind (English explanations and wording of French recipes), and Julia Child eventually also became a TV-cooking celebrity in the US.

In 2002, Julie Powell (Adams) was working at the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation’s call centre, where she would answer calls from family and/or friends of victim of the 9/11 attacks. But this job did not fulfil Julie, as the type of comments she would get would include, among others, derision about her lack of power to actually deal with their problems or ideas. Julie was quite a fan of Julia’s, and we see this in a few scenes of Julie watching Julia’s recorded black-and-white cooking show. Julie decided to take Julia’s cookbook, and work her way through it, 524 recipes in 365 days, that’s almost 1½ recipe per day. And to add to her workload, Julie also decided to blog about her year of culinary excellence and pressure.

Julie & Julia is, to my recollection, one of very few movies that can claim to be based on two true stories. They may still be related, but they are two distinct stories. What sets it further apart is that each of the two forms in itself an engaging story, with sweet humour and drama at the forefront. The movie had the audience raucously laughing most of the time, as both Meryl Streep and Amy Adams kept delivering witty lines with a pitch perfect sense of comedic timing and panache. The romances form an endearing part of the story – the one between Julia and Paul blossoming just about every moment they are on screen, and the one between Julie and Eric (Messina) standing strong for most of the film, but enduring its times of hardship (Eric actually left Julie for a short while at one stage).

Near the end of the film Julia’s kitchen is shown as a museum exhibit that Julie and Eric visit, and when they walk out, the focus stays on the kitchen as we now see the sun’s rays coming in through the window, and suddenly Julia walks into her own kitchen, opening a pot on the stove and continuing cooking some meal just as Paul also walks in. This was a beautiful little seamless transition to bring the two stories even closer together, and a great send-off for a delightfully up-beat feel-good movie. Do not make the same mistake I almost made and dismiss Julie & Julia out of hand, as this is a little gem of a movie.