Julie & Julia

2009
Director: Nora Ephron
Cast: Meryl Streep, Amy Adams and Stanley Tucci
Plot: Julia Child's story of her start in the cooking profession is intertwined with blogger Julie Powell's 2002 challenge to cook all the recipes in Child's first book.

I Would Have Preferred Just Julia
by C. True

I always enjoyed watching Julia Child, she was so strangely charismatic and personable it seemed everyone got her humor and charms. And Julia Child had an amazing life that certainly has enough material for a great movie. Then you add on the fact that you got Meryl Streep to play Julia and you wonder why anyone let this movie go forward with this Julie character still in tow. Every time the story would switch from Julia to Julie I moaned a little inside. Julia Child was witty and strong-willed and entertaining, and she is played as such. I don’t know what this Julie was like in real life but she is written and portrayed as a real downer. Seriously, I wouldn’t even really want to be her friend, let alone can I relate at all to her husband. I didn’t empathize with him because if I’d gotten at all immersed in these characters I would have hoped for him to leave Julie to find someone nicer. Someone a little more emotionally stable. Julie is really your typical insecure movie-woman who is so self-obsessed with her own insecurities that she never does much more than complain. Why does this weak woman character persist in movies? Who is the audience that relates to her or finds her pitiful breakdowns entertaining? Personally, I don’t know any women this self-loathing and insane. Juxtapose this with Julia Child whose accomplishments are many. While we get the interesting history of how much effort and years of work it took to get Mastering the Art of French Cooking published, and how she continued to persevere, we see that Julie has a melt down at the slightest hint of conflict. And she’s writing a blog. I don’t think the comparison is fun, silly, or meaningful. When we find out later in the movie that Julia Child doesn’t like Julie’s blog it felt good, I wanted to hear more. What were Julia’s criticisms? Hearing them would have surely been more enjoyable than watching the last 15 minutes of this movie.

All of this aside, if you’ve seen commercials for this movie you know already that Meryl Streep captures Julia Child completely. Her portrayal made me think it would have been enormously fun just to know Julia Child and have a conversation about the weather. And of course that was always how it felt watching her cook. And the relationship between her and Mr. Child, played by Stanley Tucci, is sweet and endearing. They are a couple you’d love to have over for dinner, Julie and her boyfriend? Not so much.