Cast: Meryl Streep, Amy Adams, Stanley Tucci

Director: Nora Ephron

Screenplay: Nora Ephron

Running time: 1 hr 35 mins

Genre: Romance/Comedy



CRITIQUE:


Nora Ephron is one contented woman. We have to give her that. Whereas other contemporary directors flit from one genre to the next, Ephron remains comfortably perched on her snug and cosy romantic-comedy couch. On her table, she serves up a cinematic banquet teeming with romcom dishes, the appetising and generally pleasing When Harry Met Sally, Sleepless in Seattle and You’ve Got Mail, albeit with one flavourless course that was Bewitched, arguably the spoiler of what should be an entertaining menu for anyone who craves for some metropolitan romance. Now she concocts a culinary comedy spiced up with her key ingredient of adult relationships (surprise, surprise!), with added whimsy and yes, food porn. Julie & Julia’s grub shots are so ludicrously gratuitous that one can’t help feeling a little peckish throughout the film.


But despite the orgy of food here, Julie & Julia is surprisingly delectable, even for an Ephron standard. She interweaves two true-to-life stories, an American culinary icon Julia Child circa postwar Paris on one hand and a recent day civil servant Julie Powell on the other. Both are given The Hours treatment where two narrative strands at both ends of a timeline overlap through each other; Child as a Cordon Bleu student, chopping and chirruping her way in the kitchen, and her subsequent achievement with her Mastering the Art of French Cooking publication, as Powell cooks more than 500 recipes of the same book and blogs her way through 365 days in the internet. But the message here is not really learning how to cook a delightful beouf borguignon, but the understanding of the vicissitudes of love, the real food for life.


Amy Adams accommodates what she can with the material she’s been given as Julia Powell, who, in purely technical terms, actually a self-absorbed, ambitious attention-seeker hiding beneath a winsome face who talks and grins to herself like a demented version of Carrie Bradshaw typing in front of her PC. Nonetheless, Adams brings enough charm and sensibility to sidestep a rather irritating character. But it’s the Athena of the American movie Industry, Meryl Streep who steals the entire show with her capacious, wonderfully drawn Julia Child. For every high-pitched cackle and siphoning titillating French verbs, there’s an equivalent poignancy to her Child, a personally unfulfilled, childless woman. It’s this other half of the film that’s more interesting and shall we say, with more meat, as Streep’s Child and Stanley Tucci’s brilliantly portrayed husband Paul doesn’t have to deal with storming, unstable relationships. Theirs is a more mature, sophisticated cooking to revel in, two adults who are clearly made for each other and accepts the inadequacies of both parties.


VERDICT:

If Nora Ephron were to run a restaurant, her menu would be filled with comfort food. Her latest addition to her cinematic canon Julie & Julia is thematically undemanding to tuck in, like a dish you’re familiar of eating, although it’s far from being tasteless. Anyone with a joie de vivre about Meryl Streep and food porn will find this lip-smackingly delectable.




RATING: B+