Julie & Julia Offers Up Two Pleasant True Stories For The Price of One

The saddest part of watching Julie & Julia in 2019 is that it feels as foreign from modern American cinema as 1953's The Big Heat (another movie I watched for the first time yesterday). Can one even imagine the current version of Sony/Columbia, whose present-day slate features Peter Rabbit, Men in Black International and a Morbius the Living Vampire movie, spending $40 million on a delightful mid-budget movie like this? Julie & Julia was mighty profitable in its initial theatrical release and scored a Best Actress Oscar nomination, but if they tried to make it today, well, they'd have to make it as an eight-episode Netflix miniseries, there's just no room in the modern American marketplace for movies that aren't made for under $10 million or over $250 million.


Woes about Julie & Julia and other mid-budget movies not being able to get made today, let's look at the film itself, which proves to be a charming feature. With Julie & Julia, you basically get two movies for the price of one, as our framing story concerns the plight of Julie Powell, who is living a mundane existence with her husband above a pizzeria in 2002 New York City. Deciding to add purpose to her life, she starts a blog (hey, that's what this website is!) about her cooking every recipe in Julia Child's cookbook Mastering the Art of French Cooking over the course of one year. While she embarks on this task, we also see flashbacks to Julia Child (Meryl Streep) in the 1950s going through her own existential crisis and discovering her love for cooking in Paris, France in the process.

This commitment to telling a pair of storylines in the screenplay by Nora Ephron (who also directs Julie & Julia) at first emerges as a perfectly pleasant but not especially essential narrative device, but once Julie & Julia enters its third act, it becomes far clearer what Ephron is looking to achieve here. Julie is enamored with Julia Child, but she puts her on a pedestal as a human being who could never say vulgar language, be down in the dumps or struggle with cooking. In these flashback sequences, though, we get to see the reality of Julia Child as someone who did indeed have moments of vulnerability like any human being. There are more similarities between herself and Julie Powell than the latter even realize and these flashback sequences help to emphasize that nicely

The film makes the similarities between these two seemingly incongruous characters even more apparent in the final stretch of the runtime through some clever pieces of editing and scene transitions that help to create a sense of unity across the two plotlines. Ephron's script ends up making the flashback sequences prove integral to Julie Powell's own character arc in one of the screenplays best features., On the other hand, Ephron's writing does have a bad habit of leaning too heavily on voice-over or clumsy expository dialogue to explain on-screen activities or character beats that could have been clear on simply a visual level. It's at least clear why there's such an abundance of voice-over in Julie & Julia since it's an easy way to allow Julie Powell's real-life blog posts or actual letters written by Julia Child and her husband Paul (Stanley Tucci) to have a presence in the film.

However,, just because there's a reason for omnipresent voice-over narration to be there doesn't excuse a  subpar execution of this narration that frequently leaves it feeling extraneous to the scenes it inhabits. The fact that there are so many dialogue-free shots of food simmering in a pan that are enough on their own to get one's mouth watering reminds one that, sometimes, images are all you need to tell a story. Less dialogue can indeed be more. While the voice-over element can be grating, kudos to both Nora Ephron's writing and directing for creating something so breezy and pleasant to watch thanks to it realizing that its strengths lie in the simple things. The chemistry between Meryl Streep and Stanley Tucci is utterly delightful and Ephron smartly leans on their rapport to deliver some of the most entertaining moments of the movie.

The impressively versatile Amy Adams also makes for a great choice in an every-person lead role who makes the ups and downs suffered by Julie in her cooking quest discernably relatable. Occupying the other lead role in this production is Meryl Streep tasked with playing the larger-than-life cooking figure Julia Child. Such a boisterous personality would seem to be a recipe for the kind of hammy performances Streep has a more inconsistent track record with in films like August: Osage County. Luckily, Streep proves to be an utter delight in the part, she makes the dauntless spirit of Julia Child endearing as all heck and, much like Adams, makes the humanity of an unorthodox individual palpable. Julie & Julia isn't a cinematic dish full of all that many surprises, but with the assured direction of Nora Ephron and a pair of delectable lead performances, it does prove to be a tasty treat!