Julie & Julia

Julie and Julia (link is to my review from a few years ago), the book, is a memoir written by New Yorker Julie Powell, who in 2002 found herself coming up on the big 3-0 in the midst of serious career angst. Her aspirations of becoming a writer were not panning out for her, and she found herself in that horrible quadrant of the work spectrum that I like to call, bored and stressed. She had an emotionally stressful job (talking to people about the memorial for the victims of September 11th…many of the people who called had lost loved ones that day) that was at the same time the somewhat mundane and soul sucking life of a cubical dweller. Many of us can relate, at least to the cube dweller part. So, she finds herself going through some ennui, and decides that what she loves to do, besides write, is to cook, eat, drink, swear, and watch Buffy and 24. So she decides to take on a cooking project, and write about it via a blog. The cooking project she takes on is to cook all 524 recipes in Julia Child’s iconic cookbook, Mastering the Art of French Cooking. She gives herself a one year deadline to complete the project.

My Life in France is Julia Child’s memoir of her time in Paris, which tells the story of how she found herself facing the boredom of being a diplomat’s wife in a strange country where she does not speak the language, and decides to learn how to cook, in order to fill up her days.  She has fallen in love with French food, and so she decides to take cooking lessons at the famous Cordon Bleu cooking school in Paris. After graduating from the Cordon Bleu, she begins teaching classes, and then goes on to work with two of her foodie friends, who are trying to write a French cookbook for American audiences. The rest, they say, is history.

Julie and Julia, the movie, is these two stories put together in one film. Julie Powell’s story of her project, and the story of how Julia Child, the woman, became Julia Child, the icon.

I read a few reviews of the movie before we went to see it, and I came away with the impression that the Julia Child scenes were wonderful and amazing, and the Julie Powell scenes were somewhat boring and lackluster. On the surface this may be true, because the Julia scenes were indeed charming and funny. Perhaps it’s because I’m a blogger, and I love to cook, and I read Powell’s memoir, but I really enjoyed both sides of this story. That Julia Child embraced life with a joie de vivre and absolute gusto jumps out at you from the screen. Meryl Streep is fabulous as Child, hilarious and warm and fearless. Julie Powell does not have this same gusto, she is not a beloved and familiar American icon, so her segments are not as compelling. But they are compelling nonetheless, and Amy Adams does a wonderful job of bringing the Julie from the book to life on screen. It has been argued that a more enjoyable film might have been a full length of just the Child story. I won’t argue that point one way or the other, because it would have been an entirely different film. I will say that I enjoyed the film quite a bit, though Powell’s potty mouth and Buffy addiction were certainly nowhere to be found, nor was her own fearless abandon in the face of her task.

I would recommend it, though of course, as you’re all bloggers, you’ll probably relate more to the Powell character than the reviewers have. I certainly did. I keep reading that you’ll come out of the theater hungry, because the food looks so wonderful. Ted said that Powell’s husband’s table manners cured him of any hunger.  Seriously gross.  Maya wants me to make the boeuf bourguignon sometime. I have a feeling this film will make the dish very popular this year (reports are that Amazon is suddenly out of stock on Mastering the Art of French Cooking). But I’m going to wait until the weather around here cools off somewhat before I give it a try.