After seeing director Nora Ephron’s Julie & Julia I felt like singing “Food, Glorious Food,” the musical number that opens the Oscar-winning musical Oliver! When tiny Mark Lester—who played Oliver, the orphaned urchin— stepped up to the mean workhouse overseer with his empty bowl and begged, “Please sir, I want some more,” he described my feelings about Julie & Julia exactly. This delectable, adorable movie—yes, “delectable” is the proper word for it—definitely leaves one hungering for another helping.
It’s a great return to form for writer-director Nora Ephron, who smartly decided to combine adaptations of Julie Powell’s best-seller (based on her blog) about cooking the recipes in Julia Child’s renowned cookbook and Child’s own memoir about her early days before becoming the world’s beloved French chef. From the moment we see Meryl Streep, as Child, exclaim with abject wonder as she gazes into a frying pan, “Butter!” the audience melts in her mouth. This is in 1949, when Child and her husband Paul (Stanley Tucci), a foreign service officer, are in residence in Paris, her spiritual home.
Ephron contrasts the bubbly Julia with the creatively stifled Julie Powell (Amy Adams, re-teaming with Streep after last year’s Doubt). Powell lives with her husband in a run-of-the-mill Brooklyn walk-up and works a day job that doesn’t offer much in the way of responsibility or creativity. Worse, she’s surrounded by a passel of career-driven women who are getting places in modern-day Manhattan. “I have thoughts,” she announces to her patient husband, Eric (Chris Messina), after a particularly frustrating lunch with the girls. Then she comes up with the idea of cooking all of Child’s recipes in a year’s time and blogging about the results. As the project continues, with its shares of tiny triumphs and disasters, Ephron takes us back to Paris to track Child’s own path to fame and glory. At the outset of her career Child was creatively stifled, too, and Ephron gradually interweaves the connections between the mentor and student until a lively, warm-hearted dual portrait, combining past and present, emerges.
The filmmakers have decried the idea that Julie & Julia is simply a chick flick and, though it clearly is, it’s also a loving, old-fashioned tribute to individualism—the courage to be oneself, and to dream and to not give up on the dream when adversity strikes. This theme, one of the movie’s oldest and most potent, is repeatedly emphasized. Whether it’s at the stove or on the computer, Ephron’s message that, with hard work and pluck, talent will shine through no matter the medium or the time period (especially with the help of a loveable, supportive partner). The film also lets us share in the emotionally satisfying payoff of the personal triumphs of the two ladies when success finally comes, the validation for all the hard work. It’s a message that particularly suits Ephron, whose talent for combing old and new and honoring it has been a hallmark of films.
Ephron’s movie also speaks to the importance of creative mentors on their followers—oftentimes those one can’t possibly hope to meet—whose lives are often just as important an example as their output. (Susie Boyt’s recent book “My Judy Garland Life” is a fascinating examination of this largely unexplored subject.) By the time Julie complains to her husband about her mentor, “I’m never going to meet her,” his response—”You already know her”—rings true. In all the most important ways she does. It doesn’t take much imagination for both this and the “work hard, dream hard, win big” moral to resonate with gay audiences and other often disenfranchised groups who are historically used to doing both these things at the movies and in real life.
From the outset, Streep perfectly captures Child’s famous buoyancy. Her enthusiasm is so delightfully contagious one wants more of her performance the way one wants more of the constant array of fabulous dishes on display. At first one resents the interruptions of the sweet but not particularly personable Powell and the cutaways from the fabulously chic detailed, early ’50s Paris settings to the cacophony of Manhattan. (The vintage sequences are expertly dressed, costumed and given a jaunty score by Alexandre Desplat.) But eventually Adams’ ability to connect with audiences helps turn the tide. And it doesn’t hurt that the husbands are both dreamsicles themselves—”Where’s my little sprig?” Stanley Tucci cries as Paul, looking for his giant love bunny as he comes through the door. Ephron has also salted the movie with a raft of crack supporting actors that give it extra flavor—out comedian Jane Lynch as Julia’s equally exuberant (and tall) sister, Linda Emond and Helen Carey as Child’s French co-authors, Mary Lynn Rajskub as Julie’s droll best friend, Frances Sternhagen as a meek best-selling cookbook writer, etc.
To sum up this delicious little movie I offer yet another food metaphor: Julie & Julia is a soufflé that rises to perfection before our eyes and is just as quickly devoured by its enchanted audience.
Film note:
—Chicago Filmmakers, 5243 N. Clark, will screen two insightful documentaries about gay marriage on Saturday, Aug. 8 at 8 p.m. First up is 2002’s In Sickness and Health from Pilar Prassas that follows the lives of seven couples in their struggle to legalize same-sex marriage in New Jersey. For one couple, Marilyn and Diane, the struggle became a matter of life and death as Marilyn faced a terminal illness. As Prassas chronicles the events surrounding the legal fight for marriage equality, she also includes a portrait of the couple. Ironically, what Prassas captures is a beautiful portrait of a marriage in all but name. In My Father’s Church is a telling 2004 documentary “diary” by lesbian filmmaker Charissa King-O’Brien that covers her conflicted desires for a church wedding with her partner to be presided over by her father—a pastor with the United Methodist Church—and her hesitation about seeing him get into trouble for doing so. The film crackles with personality and, given its conflicted subject, has many moments of levity; see www.chicagofilmmakers.org.
Check out my archived reviews at www.windycitytimes.com or www.knightatthemovies.com. Readers can leave feedback at the latter Web site.