Julie & Julia
Studio: Sony Pictures Releasing
Rated: PG-13
Cast: Meryl Streep, Amy Adams, Stanley Tucci, Chris Messina, Jane Lynch
Director: Nora Ephron
WorkNameSort: Julie & Julia
Our Rating: 1.00
Writer-director Nora Ephron takes two books as her source material ‘ My Life in France, Julia Child’s memoir of her early days as a writer and celebrity cook; and Julie and Julia: My Year of Cooking Dangerously, government employee Julie Powell’s account of cooking all 524 recipes in Child’s seminal Mastering the Art of French Cooking in a single year. Jumping back and forth from Versailles in 1948 to Queens in 2002, Ephron finds similarities within the two autobiographies of women at career crossroads who find joy in the culinary arts. Through lazy writing and lazier editing, Ephron enforces a corny cosmic connection between the chefs, then explains it all in voice-over narration, leaving nothing to the viewer’s imagination.
These are the same serendipitous narrative wheels Ephron has been spinning since Sleepless in Seattle. Only here, her hokum stretches generations as well as geography and technology. The main difference, the movie proposes, between the two married writers is their delivery apparatus. Once she learned to cook, Child had to battle a rigid publishing system to get her 752-page cookbook into the world, while Powell had the egalitarian advantage of blogging her way through Child’s labor.
And as in You’ve Got Mail, Ephron views the Internet and its magical circuitry with an out-of-touch grandma’s wide-eyed romanticism, which even extends to print media: How about that montage when Powell, who has just been interviewed for a New York Times profile, can’t go anywhere in the city without finding someone reading the article!
This unconscionably precious tripe is so full of Ephron’s most excruciating Hallmark affectations that when Julie finally quarrels with her perpetually patient editor husband (Chris Messina), there’s never an inkling of intensity or permanence to it. Ditto to the moment when Child’s similarly angelic diplomat beau Paul (Stanley Tucci) is interrogated for ‘ wait for it, it’s the early ’50s ‘ Communist ties. The soundtrack is equally offensive, with a loopy comedy score ordered out of a catalog and songs chosen solely for the way the lyrics extrapolate the characters’ emotions. And don’t get me started on the length of this thing.
Meryl Streep chews the scenery as the Martha Stewart of that time, resulting in a performance that’s definitively Streepian: predictably effortless and effortlessly predictable. Amy Adams, Streep’s colleague from Doubt, portrays Powell as an unlikable, narcissistic bitch who at least has the self-awareness to call herself one. It may be a spot-on portrayal of the real McCoy, but that doesn’t mean it’s someone we want to spend two hours with.
And that’s just it ‘ for cooks, these characters have very little meat to them. Their prose can be cracklingly good, but as people they’re boring. I suppose it’s telling that the only time in Julie & Julia that I heartily chuckled was during an archived clip of Dan Aykroyd impersonating Child on Saturday Night Live. Now there was entertainment with some life to it.
This article appears in Aug 5-11, 2009.