The soufflé and the poundcake
Julie & Julia / First, let’s go on record: Meryl Streep is the greatest actress in the history of English-language film. In terms of sheer talent and versatility, no one can touch her. If you wish to argue, I’m in. Just be sure you have seen the following films: Sophie’s Choice, Out of Africa, Ironweed, Silkwood, Plenty, A Cry in the Dark, The Bridges of Madison County, Dancing at Lughnasa, Adaptation, Angels in America (telefilm), The Hours, A Prairie Home Companion, The Devil Wears Prada–and now, Julie & Julia.
After that, we can fight fairly. Those aren’t all of her films, of course, but this listing suggests her range. At 60 she’s still at the top of her game, making her characters live and breathe; and unlike other stars her age she has yet to become stylized and mannered, trapped in the amber of self-parody.
Writer and director Nora Ephron has constructed another of her two-part stories. This time, perhaps in the interest of box-office receipts, she has adapted two books: Julia Child’s My Life in France and Julie Powell’s Julie & Julia, the stories switching back and forth to the earlier decades in Child’s life and our own for Powell’s. The conceit is this: Powell, trapped in a cubicle-dweller’s job, decides to create cuisine by following all 524 receipes in Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking. She then follows this largely slapstick experience with a blog and then a book. Juxtaposed, sometimes awkwardly, are scenes from Child’s culinary and domestic life, some of these just too bite-sized for full effect.
As is common in Ephron’s movies, this sounds like a good idea but is not always well-executed. Powell is a lightweight, and no matter how charmingly Amy Adams (Enchanted) plays her, she often comes off as whiny, and too easily defeated. We simply spend too much time with this narcissistic cipher and her almost-too-good-to-be-true hubby (Chris Messina). Some of Adams’ scenes should have been more nearly bite-sized. Adams is a good actress but she is not (yet) a great one, and she simply cannot breathe life into Julie the way Streep can, almost miraculously, into Child.
In her scenes, Streep creates a full human being, not once resorting to imitation or impersonation. Streep disappears into Child, whose personality, temperament, foibles and love of life are beautifully realized here. When she is with her husband (Stanley Tucci of The Devil Wears Prada) we believe we are with two people who deeply love one another, Paris and food. Child spills over with energy and spirit as Streep plays her–wonderful when she’s together with her sister (the great Jane Lynch) or trying to tolerate her right-wing Republican father, from whose philosophical clutches she’s made a joyous escape.
Ephron’s two-part stories usually end with the separatist finally meeting or uniting.
Not so here. Separated by time and location, the best she can allow herself is to let us know that, very late in her life, Child had read Julie’s blogs–and professed not to like them. Why? It’s unsaid in the film, but we can tell: when Child wrote, she wrote about the food; when Powell wrote, she wrote about herself. By the end of the movie, the best we can do is to like Julie. But Streep, in her genius, lets us love Julia Child, and we want to spend as much time with her as possible.
This soufflé does not fall.
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