It’s amazing how we have found ways
to translate something as uniquely sensory as food so that we can appreciate it
when we are unable to use taste: the ink in cookbooks, the images flashing on
our television and against the glow of a computer screen all conjuring memories
of food past and hopes of food to come. Julie and Julia explores this journey
through technology using the parallel lives of famed food personality Julia
Child and devoted blogger, Julie Powell.
Amy Adams and Meryl Streep bring charm, humor, and determination to
their respective Julies and it’s easy to see where a bit of hero worship is
warranted. The movie alternates between eight
years of the life of Julia Child in tantalizing Paris and a little over a year
of the life of modern day Julie Powell.
Both women begin the movie lost and out of place: Child, despite her exuberant love for Paris,
her husband, and food, finds herself bored and itching for more. Powell, dissatisfied with both job and new
apartment, follows adoring husband Eric’s off hand suggestion that she begin a
blog. And that is the start of these two
women’s adventure together; while they never meet, their lives continue on
similar trajectories: they find
something they love, culinary school and Julia Child’s comforting recipes, face
success, failure, rejection, and acceptance, and live their lives finally
pursing something to the end. Their
parallel is best displayed in a montage of changing technology: steel versus aluminum, a churn versus a food
processor, type writer versus a computer.
Regardless of the differences, technology dramatically affected these
two women’s lives: literally, as their means to success and symbolically, as a
catalyst for change in relationships and dynamics between the great big world
and their little dreams.
The movie explores the muddling of
private and public life brought about by this technology. Julia Child, after making a mistake during
her cooking show, reassures “you’re alone in the kitchen, who’s to see”. The irony of that statement and her mistake
being aired on television for generations to come to watch is thick. Likewise, Julie’s world is lived online. She both gets lost in it, miserably breaking
down and worrying about her readers and their comments, while finding her self
in it too. Everyone knows her business,
it is how her mother found out she was having problems with her husband. Yet at the same time, it was her apologetic,
self-deprecating blog entry that brought her husband running back home. Jane Lynch, as Julia’s sister Dorothy, gave a
sad yet uplifting summation of the girls’ lives: “from the beginning we just
didn’t fit in. So we don’t!”. Julie felt that too, her uncomfortable glances
and awkward interjections at the Cobb Salad lunch with her friends revealing to
her feelings of inadequacies and insecurity.
Yet through the blogging she was able to create her own persona, find
herself, and have her own successes and failures. She was able to create a niche for herself
just as Julia Child did in her day.
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