Half Filmbook: "Julie & Julia" (2009)

In postwar Paris, a young diplomat's wife (Meryl Streep) gets restless and decides to start doing something with herself, so she won't be like all the other wives -- and the something she finds is cooking school. Meanwhile, in contemporary New York, a secretary (Amy Adams) frustrated by her day job turns to blogging about her attempt to make it through MASTERING THE ART OF FRENCH COOKING.

The reason this isn't a true Filmbook entry is that I have read the latter book, JULIE AND JULIA: MY YEAR OF COOKING DANGEROUSLY, but not Julia Child's MY LIFE IN FRANCE, which this movie also adapts. But now I really want to, because Child's is the story that could have stood on its own, although the cross-cutting is entertaining and allows director Nora Ephron to find parallels between the two women's lives.

The main problem of adapting Powell's book is capturing the sense of her blogging without having her character sit at the computer for the whole movie. There's a little of that, including one very funny scene where Powell is checking on her comments, but mostly the entries are delivered voiceover by Adams, who as we all know makes the cartoon birds sing, so it worked for me In that this is (to my recollection) the first movie prominently featuring a blog, it will be interesting to see if that becomes the accepted precedent.

A lot of critics have faulted Powell's story as being not as interesting as Child's, and clearly the former could not have existed without the latter. From an adaptation standpoint, I can't speak to this, because all of the biographical material covered in the Julia Child section was completely new to me -- yet I didn't find Powell's modern search for meaning distracting or annoying. Instead, I wanted to root for her. (Well, it is a feel-good blogging story, after all.) What struck me as the greatest imbalance in the stories is that Meryl Streep is Meryl Streep and Amy Adams is not; see also, "Doubt."

I found this movie quite cheering. It had more than a little of that inevitabilty which ruins straight biopics, but deep down it's a movie about two women finding what they really want to do in life. It got a little cheesy at the end, but overall I enjoyed myself more than I expected. Besides, I felt a civic duty to counterprogram the eventual weekend box office winner: "G.I. Joe: The Rise of Another Franchise And I Really Don't Give A Shit."

However -- there is always a however -- allow me to get on my soapbox for a second: This was always going to be marketed as a chick flick since it's coming from Ephron, director of "When Harry Met Sally" (spare me) and "You've Got Mail" (spare me again). But it is not a chick flick in the men-shopping-babies way. The men -- Stanley Tucci as Paul Child and Chris Messina as Eric Powell -- are active participants in their wives' lives. The shopping in the movie takes place at French markets, Dean & DeLuca and, as mentioned yesterday, the Strand. And it's refreshing to see a movie where marriage is so central but children aren't, particularly on the contemporary end. A fictional film would probably counterweight the countdown on Julie's blog with her biological clock, but instead she and her husband are, dare we say it, happy just the two of them. [[See correction 8/17]]

It's not a game-changing movie, but I have to think that if this were a male writer and a male chef it would be released slightly closer to the end of the year, with a slightly more serious trailer. That said, the reviews have been largely positive for a reason.

Filmbook verdict: See it if you want a little uplifting summer fun, and to cast a vote with your dollar for female-toplined movies in general. You don't have to have read JULIE AND JULIA first.