A good movie can make you look forward to what’s coming even though you already know the ending. In this case, we know that Julia Child (Meryl Streep) will go on to teach generations of Americans to cook with her Mastering the Art of French Cooking and, later, her pioneering cooking show on public television. And we know that Julia Powell will more or less achieve her goal of completing all 542 of the recipes in Child’s book in a year, and blogging about it, or else they wouldn’t have gotten Amy Adams to play her in a movie, would they? Unlike some other movies that alternate storylines, I was equally happy watching either one of the two that form this Nora Ephron confection.
Ephron, who most recently wrote and directed the not-bewitching Bewitched (2005) has written the semi-classic When Harry Met Sally, but in follow-ups such as Sleepless in Seattle and You’ve Got Mail has proven better at crafting dialogue than compelling characters. This is mostly remedied here, since the film is an adaptation of memoirs by Child and Powell. It also helps that Meryl Streep plays Child. To watch Streep in her previous movie, Doubt, and then this is to seemingly watch two different actresses. Streep is smaller than the six-foot-tall woman she plays, but nonetheless captures the gangly movements and unusual voice that would later become famous. Her dour nun in Doubt probably wouldn’t have liked Child, who clearly reveled in sensual pleasure. And not just of food, as the charming scenes with her diplomat husband (Stanley Tucci) show. Depicting their life in France in the 1950s, the movie shows something even rarer on film than in real life, a happy couple who, in the course of the movie, never even bicker. The conflict comes from trying to get her book published, even though we know she’ll eventually succeed.
Meanwhile, in the latter-day scenes, Powell struggles in a Queens apartment with recipes for forgotten dishes like aspic, with Child as her inspiration and muse. These scenes are sometimes funny without getting too cute. As the real Julia Child showed, mistakes happen in the kitchen all the time. Unlike most of today’s cooking shows, Child left them in, and that was part of the appeal. So it is here. I suspect many people will like the flashback scenes better, since Child was such an outsize personality, but both of these women are sort of inspirational. That’s a word that usually frightens me away from a movie, because the people so described are usually too perfect to truly inspire. Yet here are two women figuring out their lives and making mistakes. On the other hand, Ephron and her cast and crew make hardly any. It’s a near-perfect soufflé of a movie, light but substantive.
IMDB link
viewed 6/17/09 (screening at ritz Bourse) and reviewed 8/7–8/09
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