Julie and Julia

We went to the cinema last Sunday afternoon to see “Julie and Julia”. The story in a nutshell is that a modern young woman, a writer by inclination and training working in a dead end job, is encouraged by her husband to take on the project of cooking all the recipes in Julia Child’s “Mastering the Art of French Cooking” (524 recipes in 365 days) and blog about the experience. Running concurrently is the story of how Julia Child became Julia Child.

Meryl Streep as Julia Child is flawless. She presents Julia’s fearless enthusiasm with such panache, you’d swear she was Julia. Julia’s experience at the Cordon Bleu Paris School of Cooking (my alma mater, so to speak) was spot on with endless hours of chopping, slicing, dicing, julienning, and cisler-ing. It was also a wonderful picture of post-war social mores (wives didn’t work and mostly took hat making courses to fill the empty hours) and how perfectly boring it was for Julia who had worked in some undisclosed capacity with the OSS (in China) during the war. I don’t know where they found all the short actors, but Meryl looked every inch the six foot two that Julia commanded.

Stanley Tucci as her husband was a man ahead of his time. He encouraged Julia to pursue her dream and as Julia’s husband loved her to distraction. They must have been a formidable couple.

Julie undertakes an impossible task, especially in light of the tiny Pullman kitchen she was working in. Although she becomes somewhat obsessed with the 524 recipes in 365 days, she perseveres and accomplishes her goal.

Julie and Julia never meet or talk to each other.

We enjoyed the film and felt it a worthwhile excursion.

Harvey