Nora Ephron (2009)

It’s based on two true stories and this turns out to be a double whammy.   The film covers several years in the life of Julia Child who, through her books and her television programmes, introduced French cuisine to the American mainstream; and one year in the life of Julie Powell.  Julie is a would-be writer and enthusiastic cook who – oppressed by the claustrophobia of her boring day job in New York and the tiny apartment in Queens she, her husband and their cat have just moved to – determined in 2002 to cook, within 365 days, all 524 recipes in Child’s classic Mastering the Art of French Cooking and wrote a very successful blog about the project.   Nora Ephron did the adaptations:  the Julia story is based on Child’s memoir My Life in France (which appeared posthumously), the Julie story on the book Powell published in 2005.  Ephron moves between the rhyming couplets competently but mechanically.  I’ve not seen other films she’s directed but I can’t believe that, if she were writing fiction, she would have settled for such an undernourished screenplay.  (I don’t recall a similar problem either with the factual and autobiographical material on which she based her screenplays for, respectively, Silkwood and Heartburn.)  You get a sense that Ephron planned the film to be about Julie principally but that the greater dynamism of the Julia element resulted in this part of the story ending up with roughly equal screen time.

On the one hand, Ephron has encouraged plenty of the cast – the trio of repellent, professionally high-flying girlfriends with whom Julie undergoes a Cobb salad lunch; nearly everyone playing a French character – to overact in a way that makes them incredible at any level.  On the other, the writer-director seems to take lazy refuge in the ‘realness’ of the stories she’s telling – as if an autobiographer’s saying something happened makes the event both sacrosanct and dramatically or comedically sufficient.  Julie and her husband Eric (he writes for an archaeology journal) live above a pizzeria:  in order to animate (slightly) the tensions which her obsession with the Child cookbook project creates in their marriage, couldn’t Eric just once have got fed up waiting for his mousse de foies de volaille and got himself a pizza instead?  Ephron seems to think that, if this wasn’t mentioned in Julie Powell’s blog, the answer must be no.

The success of Meryl Streep’s performance as Julia Child depends considerably on recognition of the woman she’s playing.  From the few reviews I’ve read it seems that in America, where Child became a national treasure, what Streep does with the role is being appreciated as much more than mastery of another set of technically demanding mannerisms.   David Edelstein thinks that ‘What begins as a great impersonation becomes a marvel of sympathetic imagination. The performance is transcendental’.   Stephanie Zacharek – no routine fan of Streep – is just as admiring:  ‘Streep isn’t playing Julia Child here, but something both more elusive and more truthful — she’s playing our idea of Julia Child’.   To a British audience unfamiliar with Child, I think it’s liable to be seen as little more than another typical, inimitably elaborate Streep characterisation (‘Meryl makes a meal of it’, as a line under a still from the film in the Sunday Mirror had it).   One interesting question prompted by Julie and Julia (there aren’t many) is:  to what extent should a performance be self-sufficient?   After seeing the film, I felt I had to look at some YouTube clips of Julia Child in order to compare Streep’s Julia with the real one.  Is it a weakness of the Streep portrait that it can’t ultimately stand alone – without reference to the genuine article?  No more so than with the impersonation of any real life celebrity whose looks or voice were improbably peculiar but who is an unknown quantity to part of the audience.  (It’ll be interesting to see what Americans make of Michael Sheen’s Brian Clough when The Damned United is released in the US later this month.)

This isn’t to suggest that what Streep does is completely dependent on familiarity with the real Julia Child.   Of course it can be enjoyed on its own terms – as a piece of entertainment and an infectious demonstration of a great actress having great fun.   For the first hour or so, Streep is very enjoyable – I was smiling almost continuously whenever she was on screen.   Strictly speaking, she’s much too old for the role (Julia Child was in her early to mid-forties in the period covered in the picture) but Child’s larger than life qualities somehow make this less of a problem.  On Stephanie Zacharek’s reading of the film, it makes sense anyway for Streep to suggest (as she does) the age that Child was at the height of her fame as a television chef in the 1960s and early 1970s.  Although she may lack something of Child’s unselfconscious straightforwardness, it’s hard to think of anyone else being able to play this role as successfully as Streep does.   It satisfies her craving for gestural and vocal complication but she’s absorbed the original’s idiosyncratic look and sound fully and the details are consistent.   Eight inches shorter than Julia Child (who was 6’ 2”), Streep incarnates a bigger woman very convincingly – including in her gestures, in the sequences in which Julia is preparing food.  (Ann Roth has dressed Streep very skilfully to help with this.)  But even Meryl Streep’s expertise isn’t enough to sustain a picture as weak and overlong as this one, when – with the very honourable exceptions of Stanley Tucci (as Julia’s husband Paul) and, in a brief appearance, Jane Lynch (as her even taller sister Dorothy) – she has no one to play off.  The Julia Child part of the story has no more momentum than the Julie Powell one.  The Paris scenes have an artificial, chocolate box look; the French cuisine is glazed with a smug reverence for its alleged superiority; and Alexandre Desplat’s score lacks flavour.  Perhaps all these elements are meant, in ways analogous to Streep’s performance as Stephanie Zacharek interprets it, to reflect ‘our idea’ of 1950s Paris – but the effect is pretty tedious.

Apart from making the obvious point that people like Julie and Eric Powell worked longer hours in the first years of the twenty-first century than people like Julia and Paul Child did five decades earlier, the film is short on telling contrasts between the two husband-and-wife relationships.  Nora Ephron gets over the life-saving aspects of cooking clearly enough.  Even before she starts on the Julia Child project, Julie describes the security of knowing that, however oppressive her working day has been, she can always look forward to making dinner when she gets home.  Although she and Paul have a good sex life, Julia can’t have children:  Ephron and Streep show discretion and sensitivity in illustrating how painful this is to Julia and suggesting the sublimation of maternal feelings into what she creates in the kitchen.  Beyond this, Ephron doesn’t do a lot to bring out food’s importance as an aphrodisiac and a sexual proxy.  When Julie is nearing the end of her recipe marathon, she and Eric have sex and he thanks God, as if this is the first time in months.  This would make more sense if Julie’s preference for kitchen to bedroom had been a more explicit running joke.

Meryl Streep imparts Julia Child’s joy in cooking and Streep’s appetite for acting chimes magically with Julia’s love of creating good food but, except for a conversation (about brie) between Paul and the sisters, Ephron gives no sense of the pleasure of trying to describe what you’ve enjoyed eating.  By and large, the characters eat in a theatrically greedy way and words fail them.   This can be amusing in the early stages, when her introduction to French food strikes the warblingly garrulous Julia dumb, except for whoops and gurgles of appreciation from deep inside her. But I became impatient to know more about how her knowledge and skill developed.  When she joins a cordon bleu course for male chefs, this is played for not much more than a modest joke about chopping onions and the teacher saying, ‘Very good, Madame Shield’, and thereby annoying the bitchy woman running the cookery school, who tries to do Julia down from the start.  I didn’t go to the film wanting to hear foodie Pseuds’ Corner discussion but it’s feeble that the educated, articulate characters – in Paris and Queens – can’t find more to say than ‘Hmm, delicious’ or ‘This is great, honey’.  We get the message that Julia Child was essentially an enthusiast but she must have been able to express her enthusiasm more verbally than this. (There’s nothing to compare with the bits of conversation about preparing a meal in Mid-August Lunch.)

The two halves of Julie and Julia seem to be styled the wrong way round:  Julia’s time in Paris would be more illuminating if it consisted of something other than ‘amusing’ vignettes; Julie’s year would be livelier if it were more broadly comical.  The series of snags that she hits are rarely of great moment:  that’s not a problem in itself but the tonal limbo of these scenes is.  There isn’t enough depth in the writing to make them seriously involving but they’re played as if Ephron and the actors think they are – there’s no attempt to make a comic virtue out of the inconsequentiality of Julie’s crises.  The effect is that, when the ‘year of cooking dangerously’ seems to be threatening her marriage, you experience this as nothing more than the next bland impediment to the successful completion of the project – to be resolved as simply as any of the practical culinary challenges Julie has faced down.

As Julie and Eric, Amy Adams and Chris Messina are rather unfortunately well matched:  they seem to be cornering the market in thankless tasks of characterisation.   Messina seems like a perfectly good actor but his part as a supportive husband leaves him with next to nothing to do (as a result, he, in particular, overacts devouring food).  You know from what she did in Junebug that Adams is wasted in straight, dull roles like this one but her natural truthfulness makes her performance here worse than necessary:  I started to feel that it was the actress’s obstinate, fruitless pursuit of substance in the material, rather than the character of Julie, that came to be irritating.  Adams’s putting-a-brave-face-on-it niceness makes nonsense of a scene between Julie and her best friend Sarah (Mary Lynn Raksjub, less distinctive here than in Sunshine Cleaning) when we’re told and seem to be expected to believe that Julie can be a bitch.   (The screenplay seems basically confused about whether or not Julie and Eric and their friends are spiritually a cut above the Cobb salad brigade, from whom Julie feels reasonably alienated at the start.   When Sarah and co come round to sample the Child-inspired cuisine, their reaction is:  ‘This is great, Julie – what’s more, you could make a lot of money selling the recipes’.)

Amy Adams’s emotional persistence exposes Nora Ephron’s superficiality.   When Julie’s project is completed, her blog is a huge hit and she’s being courted by publishers, she learns that the aged Julia Child doesn’t approve of what she’s done – she thinks it’s disrespectful.  Julie, who hugely admires Julia, is hurt by this; and Amy Adams is easily able to show us she’s really hurt.   But Ephron provides no follow-up so that the distressing moment might as well never have happened:  in a closing scene, Julie and Eric visit Julia Child’s famous kitchen, installed in the Smithsonian, where Julie makes an oblation of a half-pound of butter and places it under a framed photograph of Julia, giving it a roguish, conspiratorial smile.

The parallel nature of the stories and the potential frustration in the protagonists’ not meeting are actually, if irrationally, offset by the recent history of the cast.  The fact that Streep and Adams shared the screen only a few months ago in Doubt creates a connection between Julia and Julie.  Something similar but more positive happens in the partnership of Streep and Stanley Tucci, who played Miranda Priestly’s loyal art director in The Devil Wears Prada.  Although the part of Paul Child too is very thin, Tucci does wonders with it.  He’s physically believable as a bohemian with a job in the diplomatic service – he combines a droll, owlish quality with a slightly louche stylishness.  Ephron’s attempts to enlarge the role – as in an aberrant scene where Paul is grilled back in the US during the McCarthy era – are hopeless but she realises that Tucci and Streep love working together.  She gives them the space to convince you that Paul and Julia adore each other too.

9 September 2009