Is the belief that movie-going was ever a simpler experience just the product of middle-aged nostalgia? The complication with screening Julie & Julia last night was presented by its apparent target audience, older fans of Julia Child who perhaps bought her Mastering The Art Of French Cooking in its first edition. At the very moment the film began, the cinema was besieged by people who, I assume, had not been to the movies in years. While scaling the stadium-style bleachers was a problem in the dark, there is solace to be taken in the general behavior of these older patrons who, once settling in, did not behave as if they were watching Julie & Juliaat home. We have a copy of Julie Powell's book in our house, and so I have to assume that people somewhere are seeing this film as an adaptation of a blogger's tale of cooking her way through Child's cookbook in a year. The hybridity of the story -- dividing itself between Powell and Child -- is both its greatest strength and inherent weakness, though not, as reviews have suggested, by contrasting the performance of Amy Adams with that of Meryl Streep.
Like so many films these days, we know far too much before entering the theater. (There was, for example, a preview for The Stepfather last night that revealed what appears to be the whole plot.) The advance media suggested that the Powell segments would be brief, an interruption exacerbated by Adams' pedestrian performance. The film, in fact, is rooted in Powell's experience as an unfulfilled, low-level bureaucrat, and Adams is far more than skilled. (Okay, it is no Junebug, or even Sunshine Cleaning, but the material does not grant her this latitude.) The alternating segments are structured to show the similarities in human experience, and while you are left in awe of Streep's acting, I needed to see no more of these flashbacks. The truth is that the Child segments are lacking almost any conflict. When she faces intolerance at Le Cordon Bleu, for example, we know she will prevail; when her husband Paul, played brilliantly by Stanley Tucci, is suspected of unamerican activities, we know that Joseph McCarthy will be discredited; when no one will publish her behemoth of a cookbook, we know that Knopf will see her brilliance. We are left, in the end, with the wry wit of Streep's representation of Child, and that is well worth anyone's time.
But a classic film it does not make, and the problem has everything to do with Powell's story. Perhaps, in the internet age, we simply know too much about the chronic problems in Powell's marriage to buy a happily-ever-after tale of misunderstanding and reconciliation between the author and her husband, Eric. The arc of her learning is just too modest. Eric is supportive and not at all judgmental as the couple comes to terms with Powell's underachievement. He helps her set up the blog that will, over the course of a year, preoccupy her beyond distraction and give her creative life new direction. And, when she neglects anything and everything but Julia Child, poor Eric does nothing more than sleep one night in his office. Director Nora Ephron is not subtle: in the hilarious scene in which Powell has to boil lobsters, she has Talking Heads' "Psycho Killer" on in both the car and the apartment, and, if you missed it the first two times, Eric sings over the song as "Lobster killer, q'est-ce que c'est?" But the larger question of what it might mean to call oneself a wife in the twenty-first century when compared with that role in the 1950s and 1960s becomes more of an incidental matter, and one suspects that this shortcoming is what prevents this film from ever being much more than a pleasant diversion.
I too just saw "Julie and Julia" and I was indeed pleasantly diverted by it. I take your point about the Julia parts not really having (or at least exploiting) any conflicts, but you're right that it's still fun to see Meryl Streep act it out. I think she was having a ball.
I didn't know much about Julie Powell's story beyond the gist of it, so I didn't know the film smoothed out the details so much. I did wonder, though, how it might have been affected by its protagonist's living nearness, if you know what I mean--not to mention her husband's. I agree that it would have been a richer film thematically (ideologically, even) if it had worked harder on the question you point to about what it means to be a wife. In fact, the gender politics of Child's cooking and then the cookbook project were also handled fairly incidentally (was it an accident that the editor at Knopf who got the point was a woman, and took the book into her own kitchen?). But then, it just wasn't that kind of film, and actually, after seeing the previews (which for me also included "The Stepfather" and "The End) I was SO glad to be watching something less intrusively horrifying.
Do you know if it's true that Julia made disparaging comments about Powell's project?
Posted by: Rohan Maitzen | August 09, 2009 at 03:01 PM