Julie & Julia - BD
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Page 1 of 3 Sony / 123 Minutes / Rated PG-13 / Street Date: December 8, 2009
Guys: It's not a chick flick. I promise. Those with a disdain for anything that even resembles romantic comedy will no doubt have trouble swallowing that sentiment, but I have to make it clear: Julie & Julia is the kind of light, biographic, illuminating drama/comedy that never comes around. It's unique, it's laugh-out-loud funny, it's empowering - in a multiplex summer of flying Transformers and scared-as-shit paranormal activists, Julie & Julia proved itself to be the real deal. It's not exactly Rashomon-lite, but what truly sets the film apart is the way it attacks two storylines at once. Looking at the Hollywood machine, a Meryl-Streep-as-Julia Child movie would have worked just fine (and probably would have been an automatic award-magnet), but Nora Ephron (Sleepless in Seattle) has concocted with Julie & Julia a movie that hits as many RomCom bulletpoints as it does aesthetic aims that lie distinctly outside the box. It could be the first great romantic comedy that only looks like a romantic comedy if you squint hard enough: At its core, Julie & Julia is a movie about passion, obsession, sex, hatred, greed and, well, good food. Call it the cuisine equivalent of an Oliver Stone film. As we follow Julia Child (Streep) and her husband (Stanley Tucci) and their trials and tribulations in Europe in the 20th century, we're constantly brought back to modern-day Queens, where Julie (Amy Adams), a disgruntled government worker, has decided to find meaning in her life by recreating Julia Child's most famous recipes in an audacious year-long endeavor. So every time we flash back to Julia having trouble getting her French cookbook sold, we flash forward to Julie, whining and bitching about the travails of real life and how it's impossible to make things worse, especially when you're stuck in a shitty sub-NYC apartment.
Yet mark my words - this isn't an easy play for romantic 'awwwww's and simplistic loveplays: By placing these two stories in tandem with one another, Nora Ephron has told the story of her life, a tale of past versus future, of ambition versus talent, of drive versus fate. Each of the stories Ephron tells are marvelous, but the way they intertwine - and especially the way each of them implodes a bit when we learn exactly what Julia Child (at age 90) feels about Julie cribbing her recipes the way Julie does - makes the film far more than the sum of its parts. Julie & Julia is post-genre Hollywood entertainment - the chicks interested in seeing a romantic comedy no doubt got their money's worth, but this picture (as crazy as it might sound to many) does not deserve to be ghettoized into the same video store section as Fool's Gold: It's a real feat. I understand that the premise of the film might be chick-y and gross enough that many boys won't give it the time of day, but that's their loss. Julie & Julia is one of the grandest pictures of 2009, a movie that is weird and solipsistic and off-color, a movie that is so well made that it erases the track record of Ephron's last couple pictures. And trust me - Bewitched and Lucky Numbers were baaaad. Yet as awful as those films were, Julie & Julia is good. Like, stupid good. |
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