Trying to turn a pair of disparate books into a single movie is an extremely difficult task, and it’s to Nora Ephron’s credit that she has done as well as she did with "Julie and Julia," opening in the St. Louis area today. As a director, Ephron is splendid. The film has excellent pacing, only drags occasionally as Ephron deals with too many scenes that add absolutely nothing to the story, though they provide amusing interludes and will charm foodies.
On one level, however, the movie brought work to almost every short actor in the U. S. and France. Julia Child was more than six feet tall, her sister was taller. Meryl Streep is only 5-6, but she towers over almost everyone else on the screen. Short beds and intriguing camera angles also are fun to spot. And the magical Streep sounds just like Child, as can be verified in sequences from Child as a television personality from some original old clips, Streep filling the role in some made-up new ones. It is, as usual, a terrific performance.
Julia McWilliams, a secretary with the OSS (predecessor to the CIA) during World War II, married career diplomat Paul Child (a terrific performance by Stanley Tucci) and settled in Paris. Tall, lanky, ungainly and several steps shy of beautiful, she was friendly, enthusiastic and loaded with perseverance. Looking for something interesting to do, she found neither millinery nor bridge to bring satisfaction,20and she turned to cooking. The rest, as they say, is history.
Powell, also a bored secretary, decided to prepare every recipe in Child’s landmark book and to blog about it. Ephron tried to put the two stories, a half-century and 3000 miles apart, into one movie. That does not work, but the skills of Streep and Adams, and Tucci and Chris Messina (as Adams’s husband) give the parallel tales some charm and the relationship between Streep and Tucci is one of the loveliest to ever cross a movie screen. The legend of Childs allows for a few other marvelous scenes, like a meeting with St. Louisan Erma Rombauer (Frances Sternhagen), author of "The Joy of Cooking," and some funny moments with Child’s sister, Dorothy (Jane Lynch), first when she visits Paris and finds romance, second when the Childs go to California for Dorothy’s wedding and a sequence with her ultra-conservative, Sen. Joseph McCarthy-loving father (Remak Ramsay). A visit from New York Times writer Amanda Hesser (she plays herself) is a waste of time and film stock.
Powell and Messina, a lot younger, deal more with highs and lows of their personalities and relationship, and hers with phone-calling complainers, but things are brighter when her Mom (the voice of Mary Kay Place) phones from Texas to offer advice.
They may have equal billing in the title, but this is a film about Julia Child.
At multiple locations
– Joe