Julie & Julia - DVD Review

Details: By Frank Wilkins; 25 April 2010

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</script></div>{/googleAds}Many may only recognize cooking master Julia Child by the oddly-pitched, sing-songy way she would say â"Bon appÃ©tit", or by the caricature humorously played by Dan Aykroyd in the wildly popular Saturday Night Live skit - â"Oh dear, I seem to have cut the dickens out of my finger." Most of today's generation would probably stare blank-faced when asked who she is, since she's been out of the public eye for many years after a highly successful TV cooking show that ran during the â€˜60s and â€˜70s. But before there was Emeril or Gordon Ramsey, there was Julia Child, the towering woman who came into America's kitchens and eventually changed the way we cook.

Certainly, few have heard of Julie Powell, even after her semi-famous 2002 blog, The Julie/Julia Project, which led to a proliferative book deal, a series of high-profile interviews, and eventually a movie option.

But almost everybody is familiar with, or has at least seen in their mother's kitchen, the red fleur de lis-covered cookbook (or its teal-colored later edition) entitled Mastering the Art of French Cooking. Now in its 40th printing, the culinary tome has become as commonplace in the kitchen as pop-up toasters, microwaves, and inexpensive coffee makers.

It's this cookbook that forms the backbone of Nora Ephron's food-centric comedy, Julie and Julia. The film chronicles the parallel lives of the famous cook and an obscure blogger, both foundering wives, living miles and decades apart, who, after aimlessly following their husbands from job to job, eventually discover their true purpose and take control of their lives.

Julie Powell (Amy Adams) is a bored phone receptionist in a dead-end government job who, at the encouragement of her patient husband, concocts the idea to prepare every one of the 524 recipes from Child's seminal cookbook, while chronicling her yearlong efforts in a blog. Her struggles and accomplishments are brilliantly paralleled and interwoven by Ephron into those of Child (Meryl Streep) who found her calling while living in France shortly after World War II with her diplomat husband Paul (Stanley Tucci). Ephron's talents as director and writer are most evident during these scene and setting changes, where lesser-skilled filmmakers often stumble. It's difficult to pull off this technique successfully even when the characters being tracked are similar in nature or course, but even more so with such contrasting dispositions as Julie and Julia the former always freaking out over something, the latter, a true joie de vivre, invariably able to find the joy in anything. Even so, we're treated to some true comic genius moments when scenes of Adams's Powell flopping on the floor in tears of despair - her aspic a complete failure - are juxtaposed against Child comically struggling to flip an omelet or chop onions as the only female student at the Cordon Bleu Culinary School.

Naturally, the biggest joy comes from watching Streep ply her craft. She gets her character's genuine essence down pat - not only the pitch of her voice, her unusual tics and head tilts, but more impressively, how the woman effused so passionately over food. It would have been easy to fall into a cheap caricature, but Streep, the consummate professional, produces a striking impersonation that is moving when it needs to be and funny without ever being ridiculous.

As good as Streep is though, Adams is equal to the task despite her waifishly meek character. Adams is at a real disadvantage going up against a legendary actress portraying the equally influential chef, but I always found myself more interested in Powell's half of the story, partly due to Adams's performance but mostly because of the dramatic conflict missing from Child's portion.

The two women never met, but Child did express a certain amount of disdain for Powell's project before she passed away in 2004. The real Julie Powell, however, clearly sensed a strong attraction to the cook through their mutual love of food. Credit Ephron for managing to entertain us with a story in which nothing really ever happens.