Julie & Julia

Review by Jason Gaston

 

A confession: It's been almost two months since I was dragged out of the comfort of my home to see Julie & Julia and, believe me, I would have written a review of it much sooner had I actually remembered that I watched the movie in the first place.

As it stands, I actually forgot that I watched it until I happened to see old archival footage of Julia Child on television.  Then, of course, I thought... oh yeah, I got dragged to that chick flick a couple of months back.  Lost some good money there, so I might as well voice my frustrations.  Better late than never, right?

Eh, the way I write it's probably better never than late.

So, Julie & Julia is a story based on two true stories, right?  There is the story of Julia Child and her ascension into cooking goddesshood and the story of Julie, an unappreciated 9/11 organization phone worker who, needing to make her life more meaningful, decides to cook all of the recipes in Julia Child's The Art of French Cooking in 365 days and blog about the experience, a tremendous undertaking to be sure -- you would think that watching it would be more entertaining.

Although I am complaining incessantly about being forced to watch this movie, Meryl Streep has a marvelous time playing Child and allows the audience to have a marvelous time watching her play this loud and outspoken queen of the kitchen.  Streep channels Julia Child perfectly and, although nothing really seemed to please Mrs. Child in the twilight of her years, I have a feeling she would probably watch this movie and smile. 

The problem is that Julia Child's captivating and human journey from bored housewife to culinary ubermaster is continually interrupted by the trite and, quite frankly, boring story of Amy Adams cooking all of her dishes in one year.  Although great strides are taken to try and convince us that this is a story we should care about, we don't.  The only thing that I could think of as Amy Adams had meltdown after meltdown and worshiped Julia Child as her own private demigod was, "When the heck are we going to get back to Meryle Streep?"

I'm a guy just like any other guy and I think that Amy Adams is cute as a button, but still... she was boring, her story was boring, and the scripting of it was dull and trite offering nothing to the story of Julia Child, the more entertaining half of the movie.  To be fair, though, the Julia Child portion of the movie offered nothing to it either, so at least it was a quid pro quo exchange of uselessness.

Julie & Julia is manipulative and shallow with half of itself and genuine with the other.  The writers did a great disservice when they saddled Julia with Julie because, unfortunately, even someone with a bodily frame as large as Julia Child's couldn't carry this much dead weight.

My advise: Wait for the DVD when you have the opportunity to skip ahead.  It'll cut the run time down to less than an hour, but at least it will be an hour you will be entertained.  The alternative is to sit through drama and angst that is the tasteless and useless cream fluff atop a delicious desert.