Julie & Julia

We went yesterday to see Julie & Julia, and it was entirely charming and unexpectedly touching. Having read both the Julia Child memoir the film is half-based on (the marvelous My Life in France, thank you Heather!), and the sarcastically funny Julie Powell blog the other half is based on, perhaps I went into it biased toward sympathy for the two main characters… but Erik loved them too. I can’t help but think that the many reviewers who disliked the Julie story must be OLD MEN! Of course Julie is self-absorbed and insecure; welcome to our age! Great swaths of our generation draw their income and their artistic identity from being self-absorbed and insecure, and then writing, cartooning, singing, or acting about it. Oh yes. Many of these same reviewers griped that Nora Ephron (whom I liked already, but I think she did a really excellent job with the material), by putting these two stories side-by-side, was making too much of Julie’s achievement at the expense of Julia’s. I feel quite the opposite: if anything, the film shows how the great can inspire and motivate the not-great, and how good role models combined with productive activity of our own choosing can give us the sense of purpose we need to fulfill our dreams. Julia gave Julie an entry into fame, but that’s all; Julie will have to keep herself there (and, based on the not-so-much approval of her Julia book, that may be an uphill struggle).

It is very true that Julie’s navel-gazing and directionlessness serve in the film to bring into even greater relief Julia’s verve and joie de vivre. But, so? That is what we all love so much about Julia Child, and what we can learn from her — not just how to cook fabulously fatty French food, but how to charge into life full steam ahead — as if we were all 6’2″ Pasadenans with bizarre voices (in an age when ladies still aimed to elegance and poise!) transplanted to a foreign country with a whole lot of energy and nothing to dooooooooo! Julia was a unique, generous soul who was interested in everything, but above all, she was utterly fearless and utterly herself. That’s something to which we can all aspire.

As a creative person, I think the film made a really honest depiction of this path: the excitement, the work, the screaming breakdowns, the despair, the necessity of strong support. Of course Julia’s success story (as these same reviewers gripe) is far more compelling than Julie’s, but it is also a success no one can hope to duplicate. She was an original personality in the perfect place at the perfect time to become a superstar based on a how-to book on elaborate foreign cookery! And while much has been made, rightly, of Julia’s decade-plus of hard work that went into Mastering the Art of French Cooking, people do tend to gloss over the fact that she had Virginia Woolf’s famous “money and a room of one’s own.” No doubt she would have kept up her dedication to the book even if she had to do Julie Powell’s thankless day job, but the point is, she didn’t. She was a force of nature, absolutely, but she was a force of nature surrounded by privilege and loving support, and that’s something to remember too.

Anyway, we adored the film and dined happily on buttery, creamy, winey French bistro food afterward, and now I am determined to take more time with my meals, learn to make mousse au chocolat, and eat more baguettes slathered in butter. Not quite on a regular basis, of course, but we must start small!