Julie and Julia

Nora Ephron made a brilliant addition to Julie Powell's 2005 book "Julie and Julia". The book of the movie's title got a lot of press, and it was a great idea with an acceptable carry through. Lots of irritating qualities in the author, many of which came through in the movie. But Ephron decided to juxtapose the material from that book with another book, My Life In France (2006), an autobiography by Julia Child with her nephew Alexander Prud'Homme about the writing of her masterpiece, Mastering the Art of French Cooking. The book of the movie title I liked, largely because of the cooking (and let's face it, while I have yet to make an aspic, I have cooked under far more primitive conditions than a small Queens apartment with no children and a 9-5 job). I loved 'My Life in France'. It made me want to cook out of the cookbook I have had on my shelf for 2 decades and rarely used, and gave me an idea of how women of my mother's generation would worship Julia Childs.

The brilliant piece of this is that I think a movie about Julia Childs might not have been nearly as adorable as this movie is. The relationship between Julia Childs and her husband Paul is one of mutual adoration and support. Not so with Julie and her husband. Julia Childs is in love with French cooking and she desperately wants to get it right, and bring it to her country in a way that is useful. Julie Powell is at sea, she needs something to hang onto, and Julia Childs cookbook is the anchor that she finds. It is just an order of magnitude different, and the film really highlights that in a way that the straight telling of the story might not do justice. It is abundantly clear that Ephron loves he subject matter, knows her food, and that she carefully wove the stories together--the script is seamlessly interspersed in a way that will please viewers who read both books, but make sense to those who read neither. Meryl Streep is the finishing touch on the magic of the film. She is channeling Julia Childs, all the more amazing in that she is short, and Julia was tall, and how she and the photographers pulled that off.