Julie and Julia Belong Together

Director Nora Ephron was faced with a challenge when bringing Julie and Julia to the big screen, namely, how to make the movie interesting when both endings are already widely ruined. (Needless to say, there are no spoilers in this article.) Based on Child’s My Life In Paris, the film follows Julia from the beginning of her culinary pursuits in decadent post-war Paris where she and her husband, Paul, (played by the great Stanley Tucci) enjoy the resplendent city until the McCarthy-era Red Scare forces them out. After years of hard work, rejection, roadblocks, teaching, and writing writing writing her cookbook, the Childs find themselves in Boston and violà! Cookbook published. Meanwhile, back in 2002, Julie Powell (Amy Adams) is a miserable New Yorker working in insurance claims for victims of September 11th. Fuelled by her depression and jealousy of her girlfriends’ success she decides to start a blog documenting her attempt to cook every recipe in Child’s epic tome in one year’s time. That’s the basic story, which you, Dear Reader, probably knew already or there wouldn’t be a movie to critique. But the criticism remains: why are these stories married? Why Julie and Julia rather than just a Julia Child biopic? If there is a reason we must first look to Nora Ephron’s depiction of Child to understand the link.

Oscar. Seriously. It’s been a while since 1985, the year of Streep’s last Oscar win, and no one deserves a row of gold men more than this leading lady. Streep’s Julia Child is all encompassing—physical, vocal, comical, buoyant, infused with spark, spirit, unexpected humor and sexuality. Child appears far friskier than the 20-something Amy Adams’ Julie Powell, and it’s downright shocking when Julia pulls two cannelloni from boiling water and screams they are as hot as “stiff cocks!” The film reveals that Child was a virgin up until she met Paul at the age of forty. Saving oneself for forty years may seem unusual to us jaded urbanites of the new millennium, but as Julia’s sister (Jane Lynch, whose appearance is a highlight of the movie) explains at her wedding, their father had wanted them to marry Republicans, and settle down with their families but neither of them were ever cut out for that kind of life. The reason? “Too tall!” Streep’s depiction of Julia is always surprising but at the same time familiar and thoroughly loveable. She is a flawless character with grace and bite, perennially upbeat, even when she faces the deep disappointments her life offers: the void she feels at never having children and their ousting from Paris. (BananaWho RETRACTION: The author wishes to retract an earlier statement made in the article, “Away We Go Takes the Low Road” regarding the following: “[…] the main characters remain completely unflawed throughout the story, which makes them fundamentally uninteresting.” Julia Child in J&J has proven that it was the writing, directing, and acting that made Away We Go so uninteresting, not characters without flaws.)

Julie and Julie is structured like 2002’s The Hours that blended three storylines of different time periods that never intersect but are nevertheless pertinent to one another. In other words, the stories had a symbiotic relationship, enriching each other by appearing together and ultimately leaving the audience with ideas that transcend the sum of the story’s parts. This story structure works flawlessly in The Hours, but in J&J the relationship is admittedly more parasitic than symbiotic: Julie Powell’s entire character arc is based on her admiration of Julia Child, and her dour apartment and the pall of September 11th that overhangs her story seem to make Julie’s internal transformation insignificant compared to Child’s real-world accomplishments. On the surface, it may seem like Powell’s story is merely delaying the gratification of watching Streep’s Julia Child, but Julie’s story acknowledges the many ways Child influenced pop culture, giving the film a platform to share snippets of her cooking show, the exhibition at Mass MoMA, and even a vintage sketch on SNL where Dan Aykroyd impersonates Julia Child, hyperbolizing her size and cavalier attitude toward mistakes when he “cuts the dickens” out of his hand and spurts blood all over the chicken he’s preparing. It is such a funny scene that wouldn’t have been nearly as hilarious in any other context. The connection between the Js are superficial: their names, love of cooking, government agency employees, but the real connection is that Child gives Powell something to aspire to that reaches further than just cooking but an approach to living. Maybe through her blog she can not only improve her cooking but reform her character, perhaps capture some of the joie de vivre that Child shot out like lightning bolts. The change does begin to manifest in Powell as evidenced by her taking to wearing pearls, but whether or not she can maintain her newfound poise is the question her story hinges on. The film’s official position on Julia Child announces itself when Powell learns that Julia Child herself disapproves of her blog. The idea that the real Julia Child would condemn such a project is entirely incongruous with the Julia Child we have been watching all along. Powell’s husband gets her back on her feet by reminding her that the Julia in her head is the one that counts—the Julia that is pushing her toward self-improvement—the infallible Julia. So is the Julia Child in the movie Julie’s Julia? Are we seeing her through the lens of Julie Powell?

Ultimately, it doesn’t matter how we answer that question because the movie is so damned delightful. As A. O. Scott of the New York Times nobly pointed out in his review of the film, Julie and Julia is a film about women that is not about the pursuit of men, but the pursuit of self-fulfillment, which is perhaps the main connection between the two stories, and a very enticing reason to appreciate the movie as a twofer. -Christianne Hedtke

Writer/Director: Nora Ephron