Julie & Julia

I like food movies. Eat, Drink, Man, Woman, and Babette's Feast (or Babettes gæstebud, for the delicious original title), are probably my favorites. Julie & Julia is a brilliant movie, and the DVD will sit well next to the above.

The movie weaves together two autobiographical works: My Life in France, by Julia Child, and Julie & Julia, by Julie Powell. Julia Child deserves secular canonization, if such is available. In a series of monumental best sellers, she brought the idea of cooking as an art to millions of American households. I was fed, for my first twenty years or so, from a Southern tradition that treated vegetables like detainees: boil 'em until they confess. Not that my mother was a bad cook. She was a fine cook in that tradition. But I just can't convince her that the yellow stuff in the water after you have boiled a half dozen ears of corn into submission is what the corn used to taste like.

It didn't hurt that Child had a very unusual voice. The Julia half of the movie begins with Ms. Child arriving in France, and tells the story of how, against ridiculous opposition, she learned the art of French cooking and was eventually responsible for the most successful cookbook in the history of that genre.

The Julie Powell story is much less weighty, very contemporary, and a lot of fun. Powell, I gather from the movie, was a frustrated civil servant in New York. In the days after 9/11 she decided to cook all the recipes in Julia Child's Mastering the Art of French Cooking, and to blog about it. The blog became a hit, was featured in the New York Times, and the rest is a book and a movie.

I understand that all the food in the film is real food. More importantly, all the actors are real. Meryl Streep's Julia Child is so astonishingly convincing that I forgot, several times during the movie, that I wasn't watching the real Julia Child. Streep, of course, is the great master of voices. I used to watch Julia Child on TV back in grad school, and Streep does a better Julia Child than Julia Child. She also looked the part.

Very nearly as good was Stanley Tucci as Paul Child. What a wonderful, wonderful gift this man is. To judge by the photos in My Life in France, he looks the part. He also starred in an earlier food movie, The Big Night. Paul Child was a diplomat and amateur photographer. He and Julia McWilliams met when they worked for American Intelligence (OSS) in WWII. These folks had a big life. Tucci does a superb job of portraying a man who is in love with his wife.

I haven't yet read the books, but I gather that the Julie part of the movie required a lot of sanitizing. She was very fond of the "F" word in her blog, and it didn't take me more than a few minutes to find a lot of specimens in the text. I gather she had a very low opinion of the Administration that she worked for. That gets left out. The only politics in the film involve the McCarthy era, and we all know what we are supposed to think about that so no stress is involved.

This is a very good movie. I predict great things at the Oscars.

 

Comments

[Miranda]

Sold! Julia Child has always amazed me and I'm sure Streep's performance beats Aykroyd's!

[lexrex]

i'm too much of a dude to like julia child or a movie like this. i'm sure julia child was brilliant, but i'm just not in enough touch with my feminine side to desire to pay money to watch this movie.

want a good movie? check out "bottle shock."

[A.I.]

Agreed KB, great movie and another great Streep performance--as well as all the leads. Not quite sure what to make of "supposed to think" regarding the McCarthy era though--even if Bobby Kennedy bought into the thing for a long while.

Lexrex, you might have a little problem explaining to Emeril Lagasse the link between being a chef and one's feminine side. Or go see the movie and learn that Julia Child had to fight her way into a school for French Chefs because she was a woman and all the other students were and had been males.

[lexrex]

sorry, ai. i'm just not interested in watching a corny movie about a couple women, who like to bake. and cutting back and forth between the life of a bored new yorker and the life of an uninteresting, goofy chef, just doesn't seem all that it's cracked up to be. call me crazy. not even my wife, who enjoys cooking, thinks it looks cheesy and femmy.

and i never said anything about being a chef and feminism. that's your inference, ai.

i liked stanley tucci's "a big night." that was interesting to me. this one not so much.

[lexrex]

sorry, remove the "not" before "my wife." and by "femmy," i mean chick-flickish.

[A.I.]

Point taken lexrex, although as chick-flicks go, Julie and Julia is spiked with testosterone compared to Mama Mia.

[lexrex]

tell me you didn't see "mama mia."

[A.I.]

Wish I could. Tell me I'm not a committed husband--as in devoted, not institutionalized.

[TerryWoster]

Ken - Always enjoy your take on movies, but your description of your mother's way with vegetables is priceless. I'm still chuckling.
Twoster

[lexrex]

look at you guys! what has happened to you? gushing on and on about meryl streep. reading a woman's blog about cooking. watching "mama mia." going on about another guy's mother's "way with vegetables."

any one of those things by themselves is one thing. but tossed all together in a singular post about "julie & julia," is just too much.

kb, next time let's talk some football or about the iraq war -- anything to bring the testosterone back up to safe levels.

[Jason]

Good luck getting KB to talk football. Ask him about baseball. Besides this post is taking away valuable time when we could be talking about McAllen, Texas!

[FascistSocialist]

I saw a recent article that said that people from McAllen had donated some absurd sum of money in the last 2 quarters to legislators. Especially to the blue dog democrats.

[KB]

I didn't expect this much buzz over this movie review from you guys. A.I.: My only point about what we're supposed to think is Hollywood McCarthyism is like Hollywood Nazism: cardboard bad. Casting Child's father as a McCarthyite turns him into a stuffed cardboard character. Joe McCarthy was a bad egg. There were Soviet Spies in high places in the American Government. Only one side of that story is kosher in Hollywood.

As for lexrex and the testosterone question, Julia Child worked for the OSS, as I pointed out. They say she just typed, but that's what they always say. I'm bettin' she could beat the snot out of lexrex and me with a wire whisk and still have a hand left over to flip that omelet.

You can watch or not watch whatever movies you want, lex, and it's alright with me. But cooking is high art, and there is nothing unmanly about that.

And Jason's right about my sports preference. Football involves too many men laying on one another.

Thanks, Terry. My mom didn't think it was so funny when I tried that joke on her.

[A.I.]

My only regret for involvement in this thread is my inability to find a picture of Emeril wielding a meat cleaver; not only because real men know how to swing a cleaver, but because real art often is messy business.

[KB]

A.I.: you should see me in front of my cast-iron smoker-grill. It's the size and weight of a Confederate Ironclad. Pretty much the same shape too. With a king size hamburger turner, I look as manly as Emeril ever did.

[Miranda]

Lexrex: At least it wasn't Steel Magnolias!

A.I.: Kudos to you. I don't think my husband would be caught dead watching Mama Mia, but Julia Child's OSS experience might lure him in. We shall see!

[lexrex]

bring julia on! i was born and raised in canton. i can hang with the worst of 'em!

[KB]

In defense of my manhood, I haven't seen Steel Magnolias, and have no idea about Mama Mia. On one family trip to the cities, my wife and daughter went to see Rent. My son and I went to a Twins game. That's my idea of salvation.