With the advent of this film, everyone is acknowledging the role of Julia Child in "democratizing" real (and gourmet, French) cooking: bringing it to "servantless" American homes. However, what is worrisome if not outright tragic and disastrous, is the live possibility that her influence on homemakers and others of the '60s was at most a brief detour away from the otherwise nearly unimpeded march from the over-processed, over-industrialized, "convenience" food system that began to take shape in the '40s and '50s and has really gained steam since the '70s. Michael Pollan's recent piece in the Sunday New York Times Magazine laments how we're ever more avid to watch cooking on TV and increasingly loath to do it at home ourselves, to the detriment of energy policy, environment, public health, humaneness to animals, local economies and small-scale food producers, and our general happiness quotient. "Julie and Julia" shows the genesis of Julia Child's culinary career as rooted in her truly loving to eat. Where has that love gone? Where's the love? I share it--perhaps my own resolve to teach myself to cook came when, at an early age, I was served tuna fish salad made with Miracle Whip instead of mayonnaise. I resolved, as many say: If I wanted it done right, I'd have to do it myself. And so I have ever since. And I linger over not only the preparation, but the enjoyment, reading sections of the newspaper or whatever else is at hand as I eat. As I always have. (Not that I disdain the family meal as the forum for proper enjoyment of food; I just don't have family around.) But what's everybody else's problem? My own mother, who I once thought of as a decent home cook, picks up the menus and coupons of new area restaurants and waves them in my direction as if I will be interested in their crap. And increasingly buys overpackaged "food" such as a submarine sandwich, with each of its layers encased separately in cellophane and with its own included metal-coated cardboard microwave browning tray for some of its "components." What's so damn hard about using a damn toaster oven? And at least buying sub bread and fresh cold cuts? Oh, right, then you might have leftovers you have to use timely, and you might have to clean up after preparation (unless you line the oven tray with aluminum foil, greased with a little olive oil--but that--that--would be work). Well as to the film, Meryl Streep is a convincing delight as always; the tootling quality of her impression of Child almost never gets tiresome, till it's echoed by Jane Lynch. When Child and husband (underplayed nicely by Stanley Tucci) meet Dort Child (Lynch) at the train, listening to the sisters is like having a phalanx of Canada geese migrating low overhead. Or, there may be something from the Chronicles of Narnia it reminds me of, like the Dufflepuds? More to the point, that interlude, and Dort's wedding, ought to have been cut in favor of showing more of Child's TV-chef career, which is barely depicted. So much more color, character and comic mileage (and food focus) could have been gotten out of that--but the filmmakers chose instead to consider the publication of the seminal and historic Mastering the Art of of French Cooking as the culminating event in Child's life, in order that it parallel the completion of Julie Powell's (Amy Adams) blog documenting her preparing every recipe in it in the space of a year. Speaking of Adams, while she's a wonderful actress ("Enchanted"), other critics are right that here she is rather a cipher. Her alleged meltdowns? Her self-admitted bitchiness toward her oh-so-supportive husband? We wish! She's played as more nebbishy than naughty. Nora Ephron, if you ever again need to write and direct "bitchy," I'm available to consult. (No, I'm no bitch, idiots; I've just known my share.) Or, Nora, collaborate with Judd Apatow, he's got it down. Child and her husband are rightly depicted as having had what, for a reserved diplomat and a frumpy, matronly companion, was a rather torrid marriage. Fortunately, unlike in "Never Again" and "Something's Gotta Give," actual, graphic middle-aged nudity and sex was panned away from. But it was a welcome suggestion that for some people who come to love, marriage and sex later in life, there is a lustiness to the relationship born of maturity and self-knowledge. In the end, Child shares some responsibility for a failure to integrate good cooking of real food with other concerns. She insisted that flavor was the sole touchstone and that nutrition, sustainability and humaneness were rather irrelevant. Perhaps that's because she learned about food at a time and in a culture where some of those items were culturally not the issues they have become since, and here. But she stubbornly dismissed such concerns and values long past when she should and could have become a voice for them. (That said, I was gratified that Julie stabbed and boiled live lobsters with relatively little moral compunction, not withstanding a WSJ article a couple years ago that spotlighted increasing squeamishness at these tasks. "Cruelty" to a stray crustacean here and there pales before the massive institutional horror of our factory farms.)
Review of Julie & Julia
