Julie & Julia English Movie
Cast & Crew
Director:Nora Ephron
Writers (WGA):Nora Ephron (screenplay)
Julie Powell (book)
Release Date:7 August 2009 (USA)
Genre:Biography Drama
Meryl Streep ... Julia Child
Amy Adams ... Julie Powell
Stanley Tucci ... Paul Child
Chris Messina ... Eric Powell
Writers (WGA):Nora Ephron (screenplay)
Julie Powell (book)
Release Date:7 August 2009 (USA)
Genre:Biography Drama
Meryl Streep ... Julia Child
Amy Adams ... Julie Powell
Stanley Tucci ... Paul Child
Chris Messina ... Eric Powell
Reviews
It should come as no surprise that Meryl Streep's delightfully daffy turn as Julia Child, the woman who demystified French cuisine for American households, is the freshest ingredient in "Julie & Julia." Otherwise, this middling melange of Child biopic and contempo dramedy feels overstuffed and predigested as it depicts two ladies who found fame and fulfillment in their respective eras by cooking and writing about it. Despite the lack of shared screen time, the reteaming of "Doubt" duo Streep and Amy Adams under the femme-friendly imprimatur of writer-director Nora Ephron should yield tasty returns for this self-satisfied foodie fairy tale."Julie & Julia" shares its title with Julie Powell's barbed-and-bubbly 2005 book about her plan to chop, stir, bake and whip her way through Child's seminal 1961 cookbook, "Mastering the Art of French Cooking." Powell's blog devoted to her crazy yearlong experiment, dubbed "The Julie/Julia Project," developed enough of a following to earn her a book deal and, as the end titles note with characteristic cuteness, inspire this movie. Probably aware that Powell's story alone wouldn't sustain an entire feature, Ephron opted to divide the film's 122-minute running time between Julie and Julia, also drawing material from the latter's posthumously completed 2006 memoir, "My Life in France."
Upon arriving in Paris in 1948 with her husband, Paul (Stanley Tucci), who has taken a job at the American embassy, Julia (Streep), a self-described "36-year-old, rather loud and unserious Californian," is enraptured by French culture in general and French cuisine in particular. The pic efficiently traces Julia's determined rise from impassioned gourmand to master cook, from her education alongside unfriendly male competition at the Cordon Bleu school to her friendship with fellow epicureans Simone Beck (Linda Emond) and Louisette Bertholle (Helen Carey) -- her eventual collaborators on the 524-recipe cookbook that no publisher would initially accept.
Meanwhile, in a rickety Gotham apartment circa 2002, Julie (a redheaded Adams), alarmed at the prospect of turning 30 and having little to show for it, embarks on her insane assignment -- working as a government secretary by day, cooking and blogging by night. Fortunately, Julie's husband, Eric (Chris Messina), loves her enough to put up with her exaggerated mood swings whenever a dish goes awry, though his patience and sensitivity wear thin as the project drags on.
And so the film implies a kinship between two women who never meet, united across time and space by their love of butter, their doting husbands, their search for meaning through pleasure and their struggles to see their work in print. (Call it "Publisher-less in Paris.") The crucial difference, one Ephron doesn't seem to grasp, is that while Julie courts the fickle attentions of the blogosphere and the media, Julia yearns to create something of lasting value, a work with genuine potential to enrich people's lives. Ironically, the pic's decision to foreground Julia's life only ends up trivializing it; by conflating the characters so neatly, "Julie & Julia" becomes the slick, presumptuous vanity project that Powell's book was not.
Doing her formidable best to counteract these drawbacks is Streep, whose 5-foot-6 frame makes her an imperfect physical match for the 6-foot-2 Julia, but who proves more than up to the challenge of tackling this beloved celebrity's equally outsized personality. Delivering an elegant approximation of the woman's distinctly flutelike vocal pitch and endearing mannerisms, Streep abundantly conveys the warmth, rich humor and joie de vivre so evident in Julia's TV appearances and her writing. She and Tucci (as fine a foil here as he was in "The Devil Wears Prada") etch moving portraits of two people who can scarcely conceal their delight at being married to each other.
As a more prosaic and bickersome modern couple, Adams and Messina acquit themselves well enough; Adams, rather miraculously, manages not to sink under the weight of her character's cloying perkiness and weepy hysterics. The overall tone of the present-day material strikes familiar, unsubtle romantic-comedy beats, with a few catty dashes of "Sex and the City" and "Bridget Jones's Diary" thrown in to taste.
While Ann Roth's costumes and Mark Ricker's production design nail the dual milieus with impressive versatility, the Paris scenes feel slightly gauche and unconvincing; commercial considerations likely account for the near-total absence of French dialogue. Most disappointingly, aside from the occasional glimpse of boeuf bourguignon, the film misses a clear opportunity to offer glorious culinary eye candy on the level of "Babette's Feast" or "Eat Drink Man Woman." Whatever auds make of "Julie & Julia," it's hard to imagine that Julia Child herself, an unapologetic Francophile with one hell of an appetite, would have been much of a fan.Before Rachael, before Emeril, there was Julia, the woman who forever changed the way America cooks. But in 1948, Julia Child was just an American woman living in France. Her husband's job has brought them to Paris, and with her indefatigable spirit, she yearned for something to do. Fifty years later, Julie Powell is stuck. Pushing 30, living in Queens and working in a cubicle as her friends achieve stunning successes, she seizes on a seemingly insane plan to focus her energies. Julie decides to spend exactly a year cooking all 524 recipes in Julia Child's "Mastering the Art of French Cooking" and write a blog about her experiences. Based on two true stories, Julie & Julia intertwines the lives of two women who, though separated by time and space, are both at loose ends until they discover that with the right combination of passion, fearlessness and butter, anything is possible. You feel hunger pangs all the way through "Julie & Julia." Platters of boeuf bourguignon, sole meuniere, fresh oysters, trussed chickens and calves' livers served with crusty baguettes and desserts of fromage blanc move tantalizingly before your eyes. But there is another hunger: As enjoyable as this foodie movie is, you wish it would take a deeper, more nuanced measure of the women who, in two different eras, star in the movie's kitchens.
Writer-director Nora Ephron tells of two real-life people, newly wed and restless with ill-defined ambitions, and how they discover their true selves in gourmet cooking. They are America's first food star, the late cookbook author and TV personality Julia Child, and an otherwise unknown 30-year-old wife in Queens, N.Y., Julie Powell, who blogged about her attempt to cook all 524 recipes in Child's legendary "Mastering the Art of French Cooking" in a single year.
The film is primed to do extremely well with female audiences in many markets, an attraction only enhanced by stars Meryl Streep and Amy Adams.
Ephron, who certainly delights in parallel story lines -- "Sleepless in Seattle," "You've Got Mail," "When Harry Met Sally ..." -- has merged two recent memoirs, "My Life in France," which Child wrote with her grandnephew Alex Prud'homme, and "Julie & Julia: My Year of Cooking Dangerously," by Powell.
Probably this merger makes commercial sense: Neither memoir is the stuff of popular moviemaking, though Child's reminiscences of her life-changing experiences in postwar France -- where she fell in love with French culture, cuisine, local markets and her classes at the Cordon Bleu -- might have been worth a try.
Powell's story about her single-minded engagement with Child's cookbook has an almost unpleasant taste of self-absorption. And by sharing her story with Child's, Ephron throws the wrong emphasis on Child's delightful memoir of the early years in her ideal marriage to Paul Child.
True, the movie shows that Paul -- played with modest self-effacement by Stanley Tucci against Streep's larger-than-life Julia -- encourages his beloved wife's every experiment in the kitchen and the writing of her seminal book. But by contrasting that memoir with Powell's, the movie somewhat distorts the life the Childs share as they revel in their love for la belle France and each other.
Streep delivers yet another uncanny impersonation, getting every shade of the famously hearty voice and extravagant, life-loving personality that was Julia. The evocation of late-'40s Paris encourages a terrific sense of nostalgia, whether one was alive or even in France then or not. After "Julie & Julia," you feel like you were.
The details of the couple's life and their meals, Julia's Kismet-like meeting with Simone Beck and Louisette Bertholle, with whom she wrote her first cookbook, and all mood swings as publishers reject -- and Knopf enthusiastically accepts -- the monumental work fill the screen with joie de vivre.
Adams' Julie is more of a lost soul. She lives with a "saint," as she often calls her husband, Eric (Chris Messina), in an iffy apartment above a pizza parlor. She works as a secretary in a federal government office overlooking the World Trade Center crater and laments that she has never finished anything in her life. Thus her determination to complete the cookbook marathon.
She suffers for her blog. She drags herself to that cramped kitchen whether sick or well. She refuses to quit because it has become her identity. Without the "Julie/Julia Project," she'd revert to a frustrated wife with a husband, dead-end job and another unfinished project. No joie de vivre here.
Possibly the Powell sequences might have worked better as a framing device. Sharing equal time with Julia's discovery of la cuisine bourgeoisie, it turns the banquet that was Julia's French experiences into short-order dishes. And even in the Julia sequences, Ephron dwells far too long on the conflicts among the cookbook's three authors.
Consequently, the movie misses the point of "My Life in France." That country liberated Julia, a 6-foot-2 woman -- tall girls "don't fit it," her equally tall sister remarks -- from a conservative Republican household in Pasadena. France released her from middle-class values and its indifferent attitude toward food. She in turn introduced the modern American woman to the glories of cooking and how she could express artistry in her kitchen.
So "Julie & Julia" is a mixed blessing. You enjoy vicariously many dishes, sample the good life in France and get treated to another Streep marvel. Stephen Goldblatt's lush cinematography and Alexandre Desplat's whimsical score make the film's two worlds inviting. Both female protagonists even enjoy a final triumph, but one indulges far too much in Bridget Jones-like self-obsession.
Upon arriving in Paris in 1948 with her husband, Paul (Stanley Tucci), who has taken a job at the American embassy, Julia (Streep), a self-described "36-year-old, rather loud and unserious Californian," is enraptured by French culture in general and French cuisine in particular. The pic efficiently traces Julia's determined rise from impassioned gourmand to master cook, from her education alongside unfriendly male competition at the Cordon Bleu school to her friendship with fellow epicureans Simone Beck (Linda Emond) and Louisette Bertholle (Helen Carey) -- her eventual collaborators on the 524-recipe cookbook that no publisher would initially accept.
Meanwhile, in a rickety Gotham apartment circa 2002, Julie (a redheaded Adams), alarmed at the prospect of turning 30 and having little to show for it, embarks on her insane assignment -- working as a government secretary by day, cooking and blogging by night. Fortunately, Julie's husband, Eric (Chris Messina), loves her enough to put up with her exaggerated mood swings whenever a dish goes awry, though his patience and sensitivity wear thin as the project drags on.
And so the film implies a kinship between two women who never meet, united across time and space by their love of butter, their doting husbands, their search for meaning through pleasure and their struggles to see their work in print. (Call it "Publisher-less in Paris.") The crucial difference, one Ephron doesn't seem to grasp, is that while Julie courts the fickle attentions of the blogosphere and the media, Julia yearns to create something of lasting value, a work with genuine potential to enrich people's lives. Ironically, the pic's decision to foreground Julia's life only ends up trivializing it; by conflating the characters so neatly, "Julie & Julia" becomes the slick, presumptuous vanity project that Powell's book was not.
Doing her formidable best to counteract these drawbacks is Streep, whose 5-foot-6 frame makes her an imperfect physical match for the 6-foot-2 Julia, but who proves more than up to the challenge of tackling this beloved celebrity's equally outsized personality. Delivering an elegant approximation of the woman's distinctly flutelike vocal pitch and endearing mannerisms, Streep abundantly conveys the warmth, rich humor and joie de vivre so evident in Julia's TV appearances and her writing. She and Tucci (as fine a foil here as he was in "The Devil Wears Prada") etch moving portraits of two people who can scarcely conceal their delight at being married to each other.
As a more prosaic and bickersome modern couple, Adams and Messina acquit themselves well enough; Adams, rather miraculously, manages not to sink under the weight of her character's cloying perkiness and weepy hysterics. The overall tone of the present-day material strikes familiar, unsubtle romantic-comedy beats, with a few catty dashes of "Sex and the City" and "Bridget Jones's Diary" thrown in to taste.
While Ann Roth's costumes and Mark Ricker's production design nail the dual milieus with impressive versatility, the Paris scenes feel slightly gauche and unconvincing; commercial considerations likely account for the near-total absence of French dialogue. Most disappointingly, aside from the occasional glimpse of boeuf bourguignon, the film misses a clear opportunity to offer glorious culinary eye candy on the level of "Babette's Feast" or "Eat Drink Man Woman." Whatever auds make of "Julie & Julia," it's hard to imagine that Julia Child herself, an unapologetic Francophile with one hell of an appetite, would have been much of a fan.Before Rachael, before Emeril, there was Julia, the woman who forever changed the way America cooks. But in 1948, Julia Child was just an American woman living in France. Her husband's job has brought them to Paris, and with her indefatigable spirit, she yearned for something to do. Fifty years later, Julie Powell is stuck. Pushing 30, living in Queens and working in a cubicle as her friends achieve stunning successes, she seizes on a seemingly insane plan to focus her energies. Julie decides to spend exactly a year cooking all 524 recipes in Julia Child's "Mastering the Art of French Cooking" and write a blog about her experiences. Based on two true stories, Julie & Julia intertwines the lives of two women who, though separated by time and space, are both at loose ends until they discover that with the right combination of passion, fearlessness and butter, anything is possible. You feel hunger pangs all the way through "Julie & Julia." Platters of boeuf bourguignon, sole meuniere, fresh oysters, trussed chickens and calves' livers served with crusty baguettes and desserts of fromage blanc move tantalizingly before your eyes. But there is another hunger: As enjoyable as this foodie movie is, you wish it would take a deeper, more nuanced measure of the women who, in two different eras, star in the movie's kitchens.
Writer-director Nora Ephron tells of two real-life people, newly wed and restless with ill-defined ambitions, and how they discover their true selves in gourmet cooking. They are America's first food star, the late cookbook author and TV personality Julia Child, and an otherwise unknown 30-year-old wife in Queens, N.Y., Julie Powell, who blogged about her attempt to cook all 524 recipes in Child's legendary "Mastering the Art of French Cooking" in a single year.
The film is primed to do extremely well with female audiences in many markets, an attraction only enhanced by stars Meryl Streep and Amy Adams.
Ephron, who certainly delights in parallel story lines -- "Sleepless in Seattle," "You've Got Mail," "When Harry Met Sally ..." -- has merged two recent memoirs, "My Life in France," which Child wrote with her grandnephew Alex Prud'homme, and "Julie & Julia: My Year of Cooking Dangerously," by Powell.
Probably this merger makes commercial sense: Neither memoir is the stuff of popular moviemaking, though Child's reminiscences of her life-changing experiences in postwar France -- where she fell in love with French culture, cuisine, local markets and her classes at the Cordon Bleu -- might have been worth a try.
Powell's story about her single-minded engagement with Child's cookbook has an almost unpleasant taste of self-absorption. And by sharing her story with Child's, Ephron throws the wrong emphasis on Child's delightful memoir of the early years in her ideal marriage to Paul Child.
True, the movie shows that Paul -- played with modest self-effacement by Stanley Tucci against Streep's larger-than-life Julia -- encourages his beloved wife's every experiment in the kitchen and the writing of her seminal book. But by contrasting that memoir with Powell's, the movie somewhat distorts the life the Childs share as they revel in their love for la belle France and each other.
Streep delivers yet another uncanny impersonation, getting every shade of the famously hearty voice and extravagant, life-loving personality that was Julia. The evocation of late-'40s Paris encourages a terrific sense of nostalgia, whether one was alive or even in France then or not. After "Julie & Julia," you feel like you were.
The details of the couple's life and their meals, Julia's Kismet-like meeting with Simone Beck and Louisette Bertholle, with whom she wrote her first cookbook, and all mood swings as publishers reject -- and Knopf enthusiastically accepts -- the monumental work fill the screen with joie de vivre.
Adams' Julie is more of a lost soul. She lives with a "saint," as she often calls her husband, Eric (Chris Messina), in an iffy apartment above a pizza parlor. She works as a secretary in a federal government office overlooking the World Trade Center crater and laments that she has never finished anything in her life. Thus her determination to complete the cookbook marathon.
She suffers for her blog. She drags herself to that cramped kitchen whether sick or well. She refuses to quit because it has become her identity. Without the "Julie/Julia Project," she'd revert to a frustrated wife with a husband, dead-end job and another unfinished project. No joie de vivre here.
Possibly the Powell sequences might have worked better as a framing device. Sharing equal time with Julia's discovery of la cuisine bourgeoisie, it turns the banquet that was Julia's French experiences into short-order dishes. And even in the Julia sequences, Ephron dwells far too long on the conflicts among the cookbook's three authors.
Consequently, the movie misses the point of "My Life in France." That country liberated Julia, a 6-foot-2 woman -- tall girls "don't fit it," her equally tall sister remarks -- from a conservative Republican household in Pasadena. France released her from middle-class values and its indifferent attitude toward food. She in turn introduced the modern American woman to the glories of cooking and how she could express artistry in her kitchen.
So "Julie & Julia" is a mixed blessing. You enjoy vicariously many dishes, sample the good life in France and get treated to another Streep marvel. Stephen Goldblatt's lush cinematography and Alexandre Desplat's whimsical score make the film's two worlds inviting. Both female protagonists even enjoy a final triumph, but one indulges far too much in Bridget Jones-like self-obsession.
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