The story of an extraordinary cook who wrote an extraordinary book and the woman who read it, cooked it, and didn’t learn a thing!
“Julie and Julia” is director Nora Ephron’s latest film, which is an adaptation of two memoirs. The first is “My Life in France,” by Julia Child, which chronicles her culinary education in France and the writing of her book “Mastering the Art of French Cooking.” The second is “The Julie/Julia Project,” a blog by Julie Powell chronicling her self-appointed quest to cook all 525 recipes in Child’s “Mastering the Art of French Cooking,” within a year. The two lives though separated by a good fifty years are interspersed with each other. The Julia Child story is far more enjoyable than the Julie Powell story but it is important that both stories are told (though it may have not been the maker’s intention) because it provides a contrast between different attitudes towards the art of cooking. The food in both stories looks fantastic and I’m sure tasted great.
Meryl Streep plays Julia Child in one of those roles you can only see Meryl Streep inhabiting. Here she grows several inches and perfects Child’s buoyantly cheerful accent. Her husband played by Stanley Tucci is an ambassador in Paris in the early fifties. She has nothing to do. Noticing that what she really likes to do is eat, she signs up at a chef’s school and the rest as they say is history. Her scenes bristle with Child’s extraordinary passion for French cuisine. In one early scene she exclaims, “I just can’t get over it. How the French eat French food…everyday!” Child’s enthusiasm is contagious. In a letter her husband describes watching her cook like watching a conductor in an orchestra. Streep’s performance lives up to the description. (She will surely garner another Oscar nomination for this performance. According to IMDB that would make her total of nominations to a record setting sixteen times.) One problem Child comes upon rather early is that at that time there was not a single book about French Cooking in English. This becomes her mission in life, as she cannot imagine something that would be more important or fun to do. She corroborates with a French cook named Simone Beck in creating that book over a course of more than a decade. At one time a publisher rejects her work because it is too long. A first planned version of the book clocks in at the size of a seven-volume set. She abhors making it any smaller lest something be left out and the world bereft of the recipe. Finally after several revisions the book catches the eye of a publisher who takes it home and cooks up a recipe of Child’s Boeuf Bouguignon (Beef Stew in Red Wine, with Bacon, Onions, and Mushrooms.) Yum, how about a book deal? Halfway through this story we are treated with the arrival of Child’s even bigger and equally flamboyant sister, who is played by the fabulous improviser Jane Lynch. It’s a treat to watch the two of them go at it together in some of the best scenes in the movie.
Amy Adams plays Julie Powell in a role that could have been played by any number of actresses provided that the set had a competent makeup artist who was capable of drawing tear stained cheeks on every other day. A lowly cubicle worker, Julie Powell devised a way to use her talent for cooking into a scheme that would provide meaning to her life (i.e. get a book deal) and show up her relatively successful friends. Her plan to cook all 525 recipes in Child’s “Mastering the Art of French Cooking,” is a Herculean task and the movie shows it. Amy Adams spends a majority of her screen time in a gloomy tired mood. She frets continually that nobody is reading her blog, has several meltdowns, feels her marriage strained, and worries that her great effort will not result in the attention she hoped to gain. Meanwhile she makes great food and praises the spirit of Julia Child quite a lot.
She does accomplish her dream of getting a book deal, which is why we are watching a movie about her, but there is very interesting moment near the end of the film where Julie receives a phone call from a reporter in CA who had asked the real Julia Child of what she thought of Julie’s blog. In short the real Julia Child wasn’t too thrilled about it. We can only imagine why the now deceased Julia didn’t like Julie’s blog (the movie hints that she felt it was “disrespectful”) but perhaps we can guess at it. Could it possibly be that Julie kind of missed the point of the book completely?
The point I gathered from the Child storyline is that cooking can be a passion akin to any other kind of art form. A person can take up cooking, much like drawing, dancing, or writing, and use it to expand one’s horizons, experiment, and have good fun. And like any other art form it can be used not only for personal fulfillment but also to bring friends and family closer together. (The portrayal of the Child marriage in this film is perhaps one of the happiest I have seen in any movie.) Cooking is perhaps especially adept at this because it provides real physical nourishment and regular intervals in the day to do so. We are especially beholden to Julia for giving us directions on how to use cooking in this way.
Julie Powell did not use cooking in this way. What she did was perform a stunt in the attempt to intrigue complete strangers at the detriment of her life, her job performance, her marriage’s well being, and the enjoyment of the food itself. Powell was going to write a blog about something anyway. She chose cooking because it was the one thing that she was already good at. And then her purpose wasn’t to learn about French Cuisine or to have fun cooking French food; it was to get a book deal. At one point, it is articulated that the whole thing really is but an exercise in narcissism. I couldn’t agree more.
Once Julie gets that book deal however everything is forgiven and she is treated as a triumphant hero by the movie. This is a mistake of the movie as much as it is a problem we may have as a society. If she succeeded a book deal then the way she went about it was okay, right? One of the more disturbing things in this movie is how Julie constantly talks of Julia as this incredible role model while having an attitude toward cooking that is at complete odds with her. Julie says things like, “Julia Child changed the world,” and “I was lost until I found the Mastering the Art of French Cooking.” When she is joined for dinner with Amanda Hesser, the food critic at the NY Times, she admits to having regular imaginary conversations with Julia Child in her kitchen. You know, just like they were best friends! As a cook would say she’s really “laying it on thick.”
Frankly the two cooks couldn’t be more different. What Julia saw in food naturally excited her intellect and curiosity. Julie’s main like about cooking is its consistency. She is comforted by the fact that after a long day at work she can go home add eggs to milk and flour and know that it will thicken. Phew, no hard thinking necessary there. Watching this movie I became aware of something actually quite profound. What I was witnessing was the portrait of two talented people approaching the same subject in two very different ways. One was an artist, the other was a sell-out. Can you tell which is which?
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