I must be honest here and confess to not feeling optimistic about Julie & Julia earlier this week. I am not a great fan of Meryl Streep and her Mary Poppins bag of regional accents and besides, it was a movie about a cook and a blogger ““ how good could it possibly be?
Rather blooming good actually.
Julie & Julia takes the lives of two apparently disparate women and links them across the years with a cookbook. Julia Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking was published in 1961 and went on to become a homemaker’s bible and her best known work. The journey from kitchen to publishing house was as complex as the Cordon Bleu recipes she sought to explain. Julie Powell began her 2002 blog as a something of a cry into the virtual universe in the months before she turned thirty because she wanted to do”¦something.
I had understood that the film intertwined the two women’s lives and stories and was a little sceptical about how well this would work. In fact, I felt more a sense of distinct windows into separate worlds. With a transition between views that was well and sympathetically timed without relying upon laboured parallels or “˜lessons’. Well very few anyway”¦
The unexpected delight for me in Julie & Julia came from the supporting men. Stanley (The Devil Wears Prada) Tucci and Chris Messina (Vicky Cristina Barcelona) as husbands past and present lent the film a humanity – grounding its less digestible moments of melodrama and high camp. Stanley Tucci in particular stood out as Julia’s indulgent husband Paul. He lent a gravitas to Paul Child and reminded us, alongside the butter, baguettes and giggles, that McCarthyism was eating at the heart of the America the Childs had left behind. As a bachelor, Paul Child had been something of a gourmand and some of the most delightful scenes in the film come at its start when he is “˜educating’ Julia’s palate. Much will be made of the chemistry between Tucci and Streep and this follows The Devil Wears Prada as another successful pairing for the two. The performances, based on Julie Powell’s perception of their lives, are too contemporary and self-aware to be quite Ball and Arnaz, for me their double act recalled Nathan Lane and Bette Midler as Irving Mansfield and Jacqueline Susann in the 2000 Susann biopic Isn’t She Great. Bickering, tender and funny.
Julie & Julia opens in the UK on 11th September