Nora Ephron is one of the most inconsistent writers around. She's responsible for WHEN HARRY MET SALLY, one of the best romantic comedies of all time. And other works of varying quality. JULIE & JULIA held some interest for me, as it's about cooking (a passion), blogging (something I do), and Julia Child (a woman I admire). Based partially on Julie Powell's food blog/book of the same name and partially on the life of Julia Child, J&J tells the story of how both women came to find purpose in their lives. Unfortunately, it's yet another mediocre movie by Ms. Ephron.
COOKIN' UP A FRESH BATCH OF SPOILERS BELOW
First, let me say that Meryl Streep is amazing. After about a minute, you forget that she's doing a Julia Child impression and become lost in her flawless portrayal of a big, loud woman who loves food. She's by far the best thing about this movie, and she's almsot entirely wasted in it. Anything good about the film belongs solely to Meryl Streep.
The film has several problems. Chief among them is that Julia Child's life is so much more interesting than Julie Powell's. Child worked for the OSS in WWII, lived abroad with the love of her life in several countries (he was a diplomat), became the first woman chef in the Cordon Bleu, brought French cooking to America and changed American cuisine in the process, and became a famous author, chef, and TV personality. Julie Powell wrote a novel she didn't finish, bitched about her job (helping people try to collect 9/11 benefits, mainly), and then cooked her way through Julia Child's famous book in a year. While the last is a clever blog topic (obviously so because of the interest it engendered and the publicity, book deal, and film deal that followed), it doesn't compare to the groundbreaking nature of Child's life. And because Child's story is so much more inherently interesting, because her character is much more interesting than that of Julie Powell, and because Meryl Streep blows Amy Adams out of the water, the Child portion of the film is much better than the Powell chunk. The film would have been much more interesting if it was just a biofilm about Julia Child. It could have also focused on some of the more problematic areas of Child's life (her inability to have a child; her constant moving around due to her husband's job; her search for purpose; her butting heads with the head of the Cordon Bleu, a lazy co-author, and some publishing dunderheads who didn't get how novel and fantastic her cookbook was) instead of glossing over them.
I'm going to assume that like most "Based on a true story" films, liberties were taken with the sequencing and nature of certain events in both women's lives. Which is all the more puzzling that Powell's life is so doggone boring. There's nothing at stake -- the central question is will she follow through on something (she never does). She has a decent job and a loving husband. So if she doesn't follow through on her food blog/challenge, who cares? There are also no real conflicts. The major plot points in her story are: Julia's publisher is supposed to come to dinner and cancels because it's raining (Oh no!); her boss finds out she called in sick to cook/blog (He tells her he's not going to fire her and doesn't want to show up in her blog. Big deal.); and one evening, her adoring husband gets sick of her being a bitch and ignoring him and sleeps away for the night (he comes back in the morning); and Julia Child isn't happy about Julie's blog (which we hear about thirdhand via a phone call we hear one side of). None of these are major conflicts; in fact, they minimize the potential sources of conflict. It would've been easy to torque these up a bit so they're a real source of conflict -- Julie builds up the publisher visit, thinking she's going to get a book deal; she needs the money due to some debt, her husband losing his job, whatever; then the publisher doesn't show and she's heartbroken. Her boss does in fact fire her; now she's out a job and money. What can she do? She and her husband almost do split up.
The film's structure is weak. Instead of alternating/juxtaposing scenes in the women's lives and playing them off of each other, we get a little of that and then apparently randomly ordered scenes that don't enforce/comment on each other at all.
There are also some lazy bits of writing, including a scene where Julie dines with her more successful friends (which is incredibly sloppy because one of the friends relies on her incompetent assistant to negotiate a $190m real estate deal), some exposition in which we're told Julie wrote half a novel she's not going to finish, some more exposition where we're told she doesn't finish anything, and an abrupt, non-motivated 180-degree character turn from Julie's mother from unsupportive to supportive. We also get the most overstated monologue of all time in which Julie states that Julie "saved" her. From what? Her moderately unhappy life? Being lazy and not writing?
The film also asserts, via Julie's dialogue, that in order for a writer to write, you have to be published. No you don't. You can just write. Van Gogh is one of the best painters of all time. He didn't sell shit while he was alive. That didn't make him less of a painter.
So what are we left with? A woman who came up with a clever idea for a blog and did very well by it, intercut with the fascinating story of a great woman's story of finding a purpose in life. The two aren't even remotely equal, and the film suffers greatly as a result.
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