Julie & Julia

Rating

Director

Nora Ephron

Screenplay

Nora Ephron (Book: Julie Powell & Book: Julia Child, Alex Prud’homme)

Length

123 min.

Starring

Meryl Streep, Amy Adams, Stanley Tucci, Chris Messina, Linda Emond, Helen Carey, Mary Lynn Rajskub, Jane Lynch, Joan Juliet Buck, Crystal Noelle

MPAA Rating

PG-13 for brief strong language and some sensuality.

Review

Parallel stories about two chefs. One an ambassador’s wife looking for something to pass the time. One a failed magazine writer trying to find purpose in her life. Julie & Julia explores how one woman lived by another’s example and changed her life.

The story shifts back and forth between McCarthy-era France to modern New York City as Julie Powell (Amy Adams) decides she needs to do something with her life in a post-9/11 world and settles on cooking her way through Julia Child’s (Meryl Streep) cookbook Mastering the Art of French Cooking in the span of one year while blogging about her (mis)adventures.

The remainder of the story uses Julia Child’s life as a backdrop running concurrently with Julie Powell’s life in an effort to show these two women as cut from the same cloth, but the result is a mismatched history lesson that does little to compare the two women in any measurable way. They both love to cook. They both love to eat. They both have amazingly supportive husbands. But that’s where the similarities end. Child was a passionate, forceful and energetic woman. Powell is frequently passive, fretful and overly excitable.

Director Nora Ephron has had a very spotty track record with anything but romantic comedies. While Sleepless in Seattle and You’ve Got Mail were solid audience-pleasing hits with decent critical notices, movies like Michael and Bewitched have been absolute messes. Julie & Julia falls somewhere between these extremes, never becoming truly inspired, but never collapsing.

The film’s failure to unravel rests solely in the performances of four of the film’s actors. Leading the way is Meryl Streep whose impersonation of Julia Child is spot on. You can tell she’s having a blast, but what’s missing, largely from a screenwriting perspective, is any measure of real depth. She’s not a real person. She’s a fantasy as created by Julie Powell. But the film isn’t written that way. It’s written to make the Child character based in reality when nothing seems to fit that. Ephron uses too many broad strokes to create the character and Streep does what she can to reign in that excess.

More grounded is Stanley Tucci whose Paul Child is a resonant figure, loving, but flawed wanting to provide everything for his wife while amorously putting up with her eccentricities. And perhaps he really does love those quirks and with Streep playing Child, you can help but feel that way, but Tucci’s work stands firmly alongside hers.

Amy Adams, whose performances have all been a bit too whiney and immature comes across quite a bit the same as Julie Powell. Adams never presents us with depth, moving through the innocent naïf routine with her requisite performance. It lacks the emotional depth that her husband Eric (Chris Messina) possesses. Messina’s emotionally available husband does everything he can for the woman he loves, acting like a chivalrous suitor. That he’s able to tolerate the vast mood swings Julie presents is something of a miracle, and through his performance, the audience is allowed to sympathize more easily. And that a non-celebrity like Messina can so easily show up an Oscar-nominated actress shows just how poorly Adams performs.

While it would be nice to believe a movie like Julie & Julia has something important to say and we can project those desires on this kind of film, there is a superficial inorganic quality to the film. It tries to be too much while ultimately being too little. There is so much depth that is left unexplored that the film ends up feeling incomplete and insubstantial. Any perceived relevance we believe we see evaporates quickly after leaving the theater.

Review Written

January 19, 2010