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RATING: PG-13 GENRE: Comedy RELEASE DATE: August 7, 2009 RUNNING TIME: 120 minutes VIOLENCE FACTOR: There is none. BAD WORDS: One or two along the way RACY?: Mild visual allusions to marital sex |
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A focus on food and an impressive cast are two tempting ingredients for a film
by Bill Wine
Here's a recipe for film success: Take one uncanny actress, winner of two Academy Awards; mix in one, twice-nominated, rising actress; place in the director's chair, an artist intent on delivering one of the foodiest movies ever made, and you have audiences savoring the ingredients and enjoying themselves royally.
Amy Adams and Meryl Streep have left the convent in Doubt for the kitchen, where Adams (Julie Powell) and Streep (Julia, er, Child) star in Julie & Julia. Writer-director Nora Ephron's successes include Sleepless in Seattle, You've Got Mail, and the screenplay for When Harry Met Sally, but this time she has raised the ante by telling two fact-based stories, set more than 40 years apart at once, using parallel story lines. This sounds unwieldy, but plays with style and grace.
One story, based on thirtyish Julie Powell's 2005 memoir Julie & Julia (Little Brown), is the chronicle of her self-imposed culinary challenge: cooking or baking, and blogging about all 534 recipes in Julia Child's bible of a cookbook, Mastering the Art of French Cooking. Powell undertakes this feat over the course of one year in the tiny apartment kitchen that she shares with her husband (Chris Messina).
The other — based on My Life in France (Anchor, 2007), the posthumously published autobiography that Child coauthored with her husband's grandnephew, Alexander Prud'homme — is an account of the decade (from the late forties into the fifties) when Child took lessons at Le Cordon Bleu and mastered French cooking in Paris. There, she lived with husband Paul, and eventually collaborated on the book that would captivate America.
Streep nails Child's familiar and distinctive mannerisms and voice, and helps Ephron sell the illusion that her character is a six-footer (Streep is five-six), appearing taller than Stanley Tucci, who plays her husband, and with whom she appears in scene after scene. Adams is charming with her sympathetic portrayal of an anything's-possible protagonist, an ordinary person who has devised an extraordinary undertaking. Ephron unites the women, dramatizing the persistence and pluck that allowed both to realize seemingly impossible quests to become authors.
Grandparents who remember the world's first celebrity chef will enjoy Streep's Child-like performance. Grandchildren old enough to be in touch with their taste buds will leave the theater hungry for more.
Nutshell advice: Don't go on an empty stomach
Nutshell review: Yummy
GP Rating System:
5 Grands = Grandtastic, top of the heap
4 Grands = Fantastic, well worthwhile
3 Grands = Elastic, could go either way
2 Grands = Drastic, go with low expectations
1 Grand = Don't waste your plastic
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