Julie and Julia

Julie and Julia (2009): United States – directed by Nora Ephron

Rated PG-13 by the MPAA – contains one bad word, some mild marital sexuality

I was rather surprised, actually, at how much I enjoyed this film.  Keep in mind, Nora Ephron directed it, and she’s best known for fluff like You’ve Got Mail and Sleepless in Seattle.  However, she also wrote When Harry Met Sally… , and I have to say that Julie and Julia is my favorite of hers other than that Billy Crystal and Meg Ryan comedy.  Part of the reason is possibly because this isn’t a full-on romantic comedy.  There’s some romance, to be sure, but it’s mostly about a passion for food and a relationship between two disparate women that is brought about by food.

The film follows two books.  The first is Julia Child’s own My Life in France, detailing how she got involved in cooking and especially French cuisine, and how her goal to make French cooking accessible to servantless Americans was achieved.  The second book is Julie Powell’s Julie and Julia, about how she cooked and blogged her way through Julia Child’s cookbook in a year.  The entire film is split between these two time periods: 1940′s France and 2002′s Queens.

Meryl Streep is Julia Child, and they even made her look about as tall as Child was (6 foot 2 or so).  She acts like her too, though it’s a bit hard for me to judge since I’m not too familiar with Child.  Streep creates a character, to be sure, and as far as I know it’s pretty accurate.  Amy Adams is Julie Powell, a young wife living in Queens.  She works in a bureaucratic agency taking insurance calls for 9/11 during the day and has nothing else to do.  Her husband is supportive and wonderful.  They live above a pizzeria in a noisy part of town, and she likes to cook.  One day her husband suggests she write a blog, and the idea is born to cook through the 500-some recipes in Child’s book in a span of a year.  So she does, idealizing Julia along the way and partially alienating her husband.

Both time periods are enjoyable, and the pacing between the two is fine.  I was never really distracted by the time periods and both are given about equal weight.  The actors are all quite good, though Julie’s husband is given short thrift.  Their chemistry, though, is sweet, as is the relationship between Julia and her husband, Paul, played by Stanley Tucci.  There is lots of suggested marital sex and I thought most of it was cute (you don’t see much of even a hint of married people having sex in mainstream movies) though the audience laughed and gagged when Meryl Streep and Stanley Tucci started going at it.  What’s wrong, can’t older people have sex too?

Anyway, the first 45 minutes of the film is pretty much gold.  There are a lot of laughs, a lot of sweet moments that don’t seem contrived, and lots of passion about food.  Unfortunately, the film is about 2 hours long, and it drags a bit from about the halfway point to the two-thirds point.  It should have been 20-30 minutes shorter.  I know they would have left some stuff out, but it would have made for a tighter and more focused picture.  But really, for a movie that’s a comedy, a romance (of the after marriage-stage), and a love poem for food, it holds together quite well.  It’s pretty funny throughout and rarely rings a false note, outside of a couple scenes.  One other problem is the actual relationship between Julie and Julia.  Julie longs to meet her idol, but the only connection they share is unsatisfactory and the film never addresses whether they actually met before Julia died in 2004.

All in all, though, I enjoyed the film. It made me want to learn to cook more and better, and also eat.  It has a few flaws, but with very high production values (especially for 1940′s Paris) and quality acting (Adams is once again cute and adorable and sympathetic) it overcomes those.  I would recommend it to folks interested in cooking and food, even if they’re not familiar with what Julia Child did (as I am not.)  It succeeds on the comedy side, too, and is worth watching for that.  However, one last problem I had is that, with all the food they are cooking, who in the heck cleans the dishes?