Category: Meryl Streep

Julie & Julia is writer/director/co-producer Nora Ephron’s clever intertwining of two true stories: the coming of age of Julia Child, a bored American housewife in Paris after World War II, with Julie Powell, a frustrated would-be writer who works in a New York City agency to help those affected by the events of September 11, 2001. Julie worships Julia, the cookbook author who made French cooking accessible to Americans, and starts a blog to track her Child-like efforts/obsession.

The strength, and perhaps the weakness, of this movie is that Julia Child is played by the incomparable Meryl Streep, who quickly disappears into this role. Entertainment Weekly already says this year’s Oscar is Streep’s to lose; I haven’t seen that many other movies in 2009, but this is a bravado performance, steeled by great support from Stanley Tucci as her husband. Tucci, BTW, appears in the possibly greatest foodie movie of all time, Big Night; Tucci and Ephron are foodies in real life. I also enjoyed the brief turn by Jane Lynch.

So the more modern story suffers by comparison because it features Amy Adams, who costarred with Streep in Doubt, but shares no real scenes here. Adams is a fine actress, but her somewhat whiny story and the attendant acting by her, Chris Messina as her husband, and others, were not as interesting, or nearly as funny.

I should note, however, that the more historical tale had some built-in advantages. When Paul Child suggests to Julia that she could be on television, she laughs. The audience laughs too, in part because they know that Julia eventually DOES appear on the small screen.

Some critics suggested they had difficulty keeping track of which time period the story was in; my wife and I had no such difficulty. Others wished that it was more about Julia and less about Julie, if at all; the reality that with a mere history of Child, the viewer would miss some insights about Julia that Julie exposes to us.