Uh-Oh, I Might Be A Woman (Or Maybe I Just Love One)

Sound On Film--"Julia Was A Lady" (mp3)
Never Been Julia--"Love Will Come" (mp3)

I'm not going to admit to openly weeping during Julie and Julia, but I will say that I spent most of the movie with misty eyes. That's a tough confession to make, but it is true. That's the beauty of a movie theater; if your fingers don't go to your eyes too often, no one can tell that you've been getting veklempt.

For me, Julie and Julia created that perfect storm for my male emotions--food, writing, and blogging and the triumph of all three! While I'm not inclined to say that I thought it was a great movie, I will say that I enjoyed every second of it.

And why shouldn't I tear up? The journey of Julia Child from O.S.S. clerk to Queen of sophisticated American cooking represents one of the pinnacles of our democracy!

Much as I like Amy Adams, I didn't care much for her character, Julie Powell, though I was willing to get caught up in the various crises that arose from her somewhat random decision to cook all of Julia Child's first cookbook in a year and to blog about it. Frankly, she isn't much of a blogger (see her blog); her posts seem brief and trite and superficial compared to what you read on the best of these pages. But, I was perfectly willing to cheer internally for the growth of her readership, the opportunity to turn the blog entries into a book, etc. And I was willing to put up with her story, knowing that eventually we would get back to the good stuff.

Everyone seems to have recognized by now that the real gift of the movie is seeing Julia and Paul Child's marriage and experiences come to life. Meryl Streep and Stanley Tucci offer excellent portrayals, and the story itself is a compelling one, set as it is against the backdrop of McCarthyism.

Oddly, for me, the triumphant moment, the moment when I almost started to cry, involved no major characters. It happened when Julia Child's future editor went home and made Julia's Boeuf Bourginonne on her home stove, using the pages from the cookbook that had been submitted to Alfred Knopf Publishing, and when she put the first bite in her mouth, it was clearly a transcendent moment for her and you knew that the publishing house would accept the cookbook and our country would (eventually) be saved from the stale cooking of the early 1960's.

It is no stretch to say that most of the food that we enjoy today is the result of the success of that one cookbook, Mastering The Art Of French Cooking, which took us as a country beyond our casseroles and canned goods and limited grocery store offerings and showed us that there was so much out there beyond us. I ate in America in the 1960's. Most of you didn't. It was atrocious.

Julia Child showed us that supposedly difficult cooking was simply (ok, not entirely) a matter of breaking down a complicated dish into manageable steps. She showed us how much precision matters. She "mastered" the willingness to try anything and embodied a joie de vivre that remains enviable today and that Streep captures perfectly.

And when the movie doesn't quite reach the conclusion you expect at the end because Julia Child was not impressed by Julie Powell's project of cooking all of Child's book in a year and blogging about it, that outcome, when you research Child's reaction, is not a matter of generational differences, as some would like to suggest. No, it's deeper than that. Julia Child lived and taught a paradox: treat French cooking with an absolute seriousness of purpose, but have fun with it. The mastery brings the joy, but so does the attempt to master. If things don't quite work out, you don't have a meltdown, you fix them the best you can or start over.

It doesn't seem that Julie Powell got that message. She followed the recipes, but not the ethos behind them, at least in the film version. I couldn't finish the book.