The response to the new Nora Ephron movie ‘Julie & Julia’ has been largely positive — at the multiplex where I saw it Sunday the audience applauded at the end — but reviewers have been beating up on the ‘Julie’ half of the story.
As you probably know, the movie is split down the middle, with only half of the scenes telling the story of how Julia Child became a foodie legend in the 1950s and 1960s.
The other half of the movie is about a contemporary New York woman named Julie Powell who made a name for herself seven years ago with a blog devoted to the year she spent working on every recipe in ‘Mastering the Art of French Cooking.’ (Powell was depressed from her job in the 9/11 recovery effort and decided she needed a project to raise her spirits.)
Many reviewers have written that the Julie scenes featuring Amy Adams are not nearly as entertaining as the sequences with Meryl Streep as Julia.
I agree that Streep has never been more delightful on screen than she is here, but I wonder if the Child scenes would score so strongly without the set-up they get from the modern-day material.
For younger moviegoers, in particular, the scenes in Powell’s Queens, New York, kitchen in 2002 serve as an artful way of showing the enormous influence Child has had on cooks and cooking in the United States.
The Julie scenes are about the legacy of a great food writer and TV host; they dramatize the way that Julia reached out to millions of Americans (those who cooked from Child’s landmark book and those who became fans of the TV shows).
I like the parallels writer-director Ephron draws between Julie’s attempt to find herself through cooking and writing and Julia’s long struggle to get ‘Mastering the Art of French Cooking’ published.
Adams doesn’t get the chance to enchant us as Streep does — especially in the scenes showing Julia and her equally eccentric sister Dorothy (played by the brilliant Jane Lynch) — but Adams plays a role something like the straight man in a wonderful comedy team.
