Julie & Julia: Streep, Ephron and the Joy of Cooking

There are, of course, two Julias in Nora Ephron‘s new movie Julie & Julia. One is short and petite, the other extraordinarily tall and pleasantly beamy. One loves to cook, while the other lived to cook. Both are based on real people. One, Julie Powell (Amy Adams), had a bright idea, while the other, Julia Child (Meryl Streep), had a calling. Julie is a bit of a pill, while Julia, as played by Streep, is irresistible, the personification of movie magic.

(Read TIME’s 1981 cover story on Meryl Streep.)

But perhaps what most distinguishes these two heroines from each other is their expectations about life, love and occupation. At 29, Queens, N.Y., resident and office drone Julie is consumed with jealousy of her friends. It’s not their careers she wants — they mostly wheel and deal in the business world; it’s their sense of importance about themselves and the world’s acknowledgment of such. Julie is depressingly desperate for the payoffs of the contemporary age. At Amherst College she edited the literary magazine. She wrote half a novel. She is owed. You can see her thinking that her mother, who lives in Texas but calls in regularly, is just stupid for not seeing the righteousness of her need.

(See pictures of the real Julia Child in the kitchen.)

Ephron’s movie is based on the book of the same name, Powell’s account of the year she spent cooking her way through Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking and blogging about her experiences. By turns amusing, profane and whiny, Julie & Julia was a best seller. It did not include a blurb from Child, who reportedly found Powell’s project disrespectful and unserious. Thankfully, in writing her screenplay, Ephron drew on a second source, Child’s memoir My Life in France (published after Child’s death in 2004 and written with Alex Prud’homme). The Child who is only imagined in Powell’s book as a sort of kitchen goddess-dictator is realized here as a real person, living her own parallel narrative arc of self-discovery.

It’s a far less needy, greedy path, fueled more by appetite than hunger. We’re introduced to Child as newly arrived in Paris in 1948 with her husband Paul (Stanley Tucci), a diplomat she met and fell in love with in her mid-30s. They are a marvelously believable pair of soul mates; Tucci makes the transition from playing Streep’s gay minion in The Devil Wears Prada to playing her lusty spouse look effortless. Ensconced in a beautiful apartment, Julia and Paul eat, make love and eat some more. “French people eat French food every single day!” Julia enthuses. “I can’t get over it.” Their only disappointment is that they can’t have children, a sadness Ephron conveys in a few deft strokes, almost purely visual — as when Julia slumps against Paul upon the news that her sister Dorothy (the perfectly cast Jane Lynch) is expecting.

(Read “7 Myths About Meryl.”)

What is solvable is the matter of Julia’s boredom. Paul and she can’t spend every waking minute together in a bistro, sharing divine sole meunière. “What should I do?” she asks him, just one of many moments when Streep’s channeling of Child’s speech patterns caused me to yelp with pleasure. She ends up at Le Cordon Bleu cooking school and discovers, triumphantly, that she has talent for it. She’s also very pleased to defy the expectations of the Cordon Bleu’s snooty director (Joan Juliet Buck), who didn’t believe an American housewife stood a chance in this mostly male arena. Soon Julia and two of her new French friends are toiling away on the cookbook that will transport these gastronomical joys across the Atlantic, touching and transforming many American lives, including that of Julie — who, it must be said, seems to have had an easier time getting published than Julia did.

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Ephron’s screenplay hints at some distaste for her second lead. She shows Julie’s undertaking as a scheme to keep up with a friend who has a successful blog rather than as a pure homage to Child. “I could write a blog,” Julie tells her cute husband Eric (Chris Messina), who agrees, because he is as supportive and helpful as a Seeing Eye dog. She is pleased by her growing mastery of French cooking, but what she’s really exultant about is the growing number of comments on her blog. She has followers, the contemporary dream. After the New York Times‘s Amanda Hesser writes about her, Julie returns home to 65 messages from assorted agents, publishers and reporters and delightedly tells Eric, “I’m going to be a writer!” By then we know her ambition well enough to be surprised she’s not crowing, “I’m going to be famous!”

There are memoirists like Child who write about what made them famous, or infamous. There are unremarkable people who write about a remarkable thing that happened to them. And there is the 21st century memoirist, who makes him- or herself interesting in order to write about it, usually through a time-centric gimmick, like spending a few months at, say, an ashram. Powell belongs to this last category, and cannily the movie lets us see how the wheels turn in her head. Ephron includes Child’s real-life reaction to Powell’s blog and lets it stand; she doesn’t try to turn the two women into soul sisters, an unusual move for the director who has brought us so many happy, tidy endings (Sleepless in Seattle, You’ve Got Mail). Powell is not devious or awful, but she’s not exactly a basket of kittens either — not on the pages of her book and not as portrayed by the extremely game Adams.

Streep’s Child is better than a basket of kittens. The performance is a hoot and a joy. It’s not just a demonstration of tremendous skill; it’s emotional persuasion. In two minutes, I had forgiven her for Mamma Mia!, and when she wasn’t onscreen, I felt bereft, even though I knew a diet of nothing but Streep as Child would be like living on laughing gas, lobster and chocolate. Poor Adams. It’s no wonder she seems to be trying too hard.

In the 1970s, I watched Child on PBS with my mother. It was obvious even to a kid that this tall woman with the tremulous voice was having tremendous fun in her kitchen. Even when she made mistakes, she seemed like a woman at peace. Ephron shows us the Child who was on the road to that peace. She’d won the romantic lottery but was still seeking — not fame or importance but a way to be useful, and to share. She was modern in the best sense of the word. Julie & Julia is structured around the idea of two women “finding” themselves, but in its examination of the way talent, hard work and ambition are doled out in unequal measures to different women — both ultimately successful — it’s got an undercurrent of All About Eve. This is a charming crowd pleaser, but it’s also surprisingly bold. Ephron has varied her usual moviemaking recipe, proof that Julia Child still inspires.

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