I Admire Your Pictures Very Much

A Review of "Julie & Julia"
By Jeff Webb

First of all, I liked “Julie & Julia.” I didn’t necessarily expect to, but I had a great deal of fun watching the film. The charming performances of the leads, the vicarious experience of encountering wonderful foods, and the straightforward and simple comedy all create a light-hearted, escapist atmosphere. Perhaps above anything else, it is an incredibly relaxing film.

Now, with that aside, it’s probably not a film I would care to see ever again.

The problem with “Julie & Julia” is the script. It revolves around two stories, the first taking place in the mid-twentieth century and depicting chef Julia Child’s efforts to create a French cookbook for American women. The film’s second story is set in 2002 and shows blogger Julie Powell’s attempt to make every recipe in said cookbook within a year’s time.

It is the latter story that I take issues with. Amy Adams plays Julie Powell, and Adams is wonderful, as always. However, when the main conflict of a story is whether or not a character will meet her deadline in time, it’s a little hard to be enthralled or to leave the theater feeling you have learned something monumental about life. Now, perhaps perseverance is the life lesson here, but when it is about something so mundane as cooking, it still feels empty. Perhaps if the film was in the hand’s of a more competent director, someone adept with the mundane—someone like Jim Jarmusch, for instance—something could be taken away from the story, but, alas, the film is in the hands of Nora Ephron, a talented romantic-comedy director but really nothing more than that.

There are moments of real human drama in Julie Powell’s story, but they are brief moments, fleeting moments. There never is any tension, and that is because the conflict isn’t engaging. Every story, no matter the genre, needs a conflict, and it needs to engage the audience.

The film’s other story, revolving around a young Julia Child, is a bit more fulfilling to watch, but even it suffers from a similar problem. Its tone is too light to be accommodating as a biopic for a real person, and its suspense is killed by the interjection of the Julie Powell story. Perhaps more than anything else, though, the audience never comes to know Julia Child. We see her efforts to publish her book, but she is the same woman at the end of the film as she is at the beginning. There is no real development to her as a character, as a person.

Yes, Meryl Streep is fantastic and proves, once again, why she is the best actress of her generation, but she really isn’t given much to work with. Her Julia Child becomes a parody of the real thing, an embodiment of the woman on TV, and Streep, with the exception of one or two scenes, never probes deeply into the person that was Julia Child. But that’s a flaw of the script.

“Julie & Julia” is a good way to kill two hours, and it fits perfectly into the summer movie season. It just fails to deliver human drama, and, while funny, it’s nowhere close to being a classic of the comedy genre. To end with a terrible food analogy, the film is almost like hospital food: it’s not necessarily bad, it’ll fill you up and taste alright, but it’s not something you ever really want to eat ever again.