Chicken Of The Streep | Meryl Streep rules the kitchen as Julia Child in Julie & Julia.
JULIE & JULIA
Directed by Nora Ephron. Starring Meryl Streep and Amy Adams. Opens Fri, Aug 7.
***1/2
Eating French cooking for 365 days in a row would be, I am absolutely certain, a gastronomical disaster. All that butter and cream can’t be good for your digestive system. Things could go ... awry. And after watching Julie Powell (Amy Adams) fry, roast, and sauté her way through all 720 pages of Julia Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking, it all seems like an unreasonably demanding task. Can’t I just microwave the duck? Nevertheless, from the comfort of a movie theatre seat (and far away from a kitchen) Nora Ephron’s new film Julie & Julia has all the right ingredients.
First and foremost, there’s a heaping helping of Meryl Streep. Playing the beloved American foodie herself in all her nasal glory, I’ll try to put this in terms that Julia would understand: Meryl Streep is butter. You can never have too much butter.
Streep’s characterization is gloriously joyous. She presents a woman who isn’t afraid to let her laughter fill a room, who isn’t afraid of enjoying a rich meal and who refuses to sit idle while her husband works for the America embassy in France. Instead, she decides to learn to cook, therefore fuelling her favourite hobby: eating.
Time to add the sugar. Enter sweet little Amy Adams as the forlorn Julie Powell, who is feeling a wee bit lost at the beginning of the film for a number of reasons, including her impending 30th birthday, the aftermath of 9/11, and her career, which is not living up to her expectations. So she turns to Child — who found her way in life by finding her way around the kitchen — and gives herself a mission: cook all 524 recipes in Mastering the Art of French Cooking in just one year. Oh, and blog about it too.
I need to lie down just thinking about the challenge, but Powell perseveres, excelling at desserts in particular. She poaches her first egg with minimal difficulty but, as we enter the chapters on killing and stuffing whole animals, things start to boil over. The film switches back and forth between Paris and New York, weaving these two women’s lives together and inserting encouraging factual information from My Life in France, Child’s autobiography, when Julie is failing at fowl or whatever else. Even during her lowest lows, however, Adams never gets too silly or over the top. Her squirming giggles and breakdowns are just hysterical enough to seem real, which is a relief because they could easily have gone too far.
In these moments her husband Eric (Chris Messina) provides sturdy support, and Messina seems all the more brilliant as he steps back from the spotlight. He lurks in the background, though, at one point changing the lyrics to the Talking Heads “Psycho Killer” to “Lobster Killer” as she’s about to boil the crustacean.
Though the ending isn’t completely satisfying, it’s still uplifting. Seeing Streep recreate old footage of Child’s cooking show is alone worth the price of admission, but seeing said award-winning icon stick her tongue out and blow a raspberry just leaves you with a warm, fuzzy feeling.
But above all, the film simply makes you hungry. Hungry in a way salty popcorn just won’t cut. Julie or Julia, please make me dinner ... I’ll buy the Tums.
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