8-13-09 Movie Review: Julie and Julia

Only two noncommercial movie showings are on my schedule for the next six days, Saturday at the Orpheum and, or course, the usual SUNDAY feature at the Blank Page. Saturday the Orpheum recognizes the 40th anniversary of the legendary Woodstock Art & Music Festival by showing the original Woodstock, all three hours of it, at 7 p.m. And Sunday at 7:30, the Blank Page at 917 West Douglas will show a movie for which John Cassavettes as director and Gena Rowlanda as start were both nominated for Academy Awards in one of those "little" independent movies that just barely get financed, in this case involving Cassavetes mortgaging his house and leaning on anybody he could find over a period of two years shooting of a play so strenuous that Rowlands couldn't keep doing it on stage. It's called A Woman Under the Influence, it's about a mental breakdown caused by social pressures, and it costars Peter Falk. 7:30 SUNDAY at the Blank Page.

And commercially, we have a surprisingly enjoyable movie about cooking in Julie and Julia.

Meryl Streep is famous television cook Julia Child, who supposedly transformed American eating by popularizing French food in American kitchens, and Amy Adams is Julie Powell, who made herself a celebrity by cooking all the 524 recipes in Child's book Mastering the Art of French Cooking, and blogged about it.

All the critical raving is going to Streep,which I cannot say I entirely agree with. Streep is indeed remarkable, and, according to Child's neice, Phila Cousins, "unnervingly real" in her bizarre representation of Child, and the result is entertaining to the nth degree. But it is also a little much, at least for me, as I suspect Child herself would have been. Her boundless energy wears me out, her unshakable optimism and buoyancy leaves me wondering about her sense of realism, and her weird delivery of the English language gets redundant and unreal. OR, all this would happen if I were exposed to Streep's Julia for two solid hours. A lot of great comics, Laural and Hardy and the Marx Brothers among them, are best seen in short forms or support roles, which takes nothing from them as great performers.

I, at least, needed occasional rests with something a little closer to normality, and this is provided by Amy Adams, who may not exactly be an average person but at least talks like one is capable of discouragement and even a bad temper. No entirely typical woman would dream up, much less carry out, such a project as 524 recipes in 365 days in order to give meaning to a life squashed into a telephone cubicle and embarrassed by the worldly successes of a circle of pretty intolerable, though amusing in shorts doses, friends. If Adams very occasionally lapses into slapstick, her slapstick counterparts Streep's - and apparently Child's - occasional bordering on parody. As much as they did in Doubt, Streep and Adams act as a team, balancing and contrasting each other to excellent effect, all the more remarkably because in Julie and Julia, they never share a scene or even a continent.

Which leaves me no time to discuss how Stanley Tucci and Chris Messina as the two husbands balance the wives to make two very believable and attractive pictures of married life. That's almost as welcome and unusual as the other parts of this movie.

And I'm not even going to mention the food. You'll probably be tempted to visit a gourmet restaurant on the way home.