Blogs are great inventions. Can’t get a book deal? Just vent your creative spleen online, get a loyal fan base, some publicity and before you know it publishers will be falling over each other to give you a contract.
At least this is what happened to Julie Powell, an aspiring (yet failing) New York-based writer and foodie who challenged herself to cook all the recipes of legendary TV chef Julia Child in a year – and blog about it, paralleling her life and that of her gastronomic heroine.
A novelty blog may make a decent book, but does it make a decent film? The answer here has to be an emphatic ‘no’. In fact of you’ll pardon the pun, as far as this film’s concerned the phrase ‘too many cooks’ springs to mind. Well, not too many cooks exactly. Just one cook too many: Julie.
The film adaptation uses a dual storyline which casts us back to the glamour of post-war Paris where Julia Child (Meryl Streep) arrives with her cultural affairs attaché husband and embarks on a cordon bleu course. This later becomes a mission to make French cooking accessible to American housewives – the blueprint for her famous book.
This dual storyline is the best and worse thing for the film. The best because Meryl Streep’s portrayal of the eccentric gangly Child is genius… and the worse thing because it makes Julie (played by Amy Adams in a terrible wig) and her one-woman online foodie empowerment journey remarkably dull by comparison.
At the end of the day, the portrait of an oddball, globe-trotting chef who revolutionised ’60s American cuisine is just that much more interesting than the story of a whiny housewife obsessing over whether her soufflé will rise or not and how many comments she’s got on her blog.
The only vaguely interesting bit in the modern-day story is when Julie’s long-suffering husband finally sees the light and leaves her… only to return a few days later like a well-trained masochist. And if you miss this dramatic ‘climax’ then have no fear the chirpy blog-cum-voiceover will explain it all to you.
The ‘Julie’ chunks of the film drag so much they almost feel like they are passing in real-time. One wonders whether the ‘real-life’ element here has been adhered too rather too dutifully. In this case, truth is definitely not stranger (or more interesting) than fiction. If anything, Julie’s story could use a pinch of seasoning…. or a basting in Tabasco; anything to make it less bland.
Ultimately this is a great story - which keeps getting interrupted by another, considerably more trivial one. Viewers are likely to feel overstuffed by Julie and insatiable for more of Julia. An unsatisfactory serving all round.
Kate Coffey
