Went to see Julia/Julie, the film about Julia Child and former Salon blogger Julie Powell. I take the time to point out she was a Salon Blogger (a blogger using the small community created by Salon.com in the early 2000's) as I was as well, blogging about the same time my crazy zoo over at Pesky the Rat, a political satire blog (rats! snakes in miniskirts! Talking anerobic bacteria!). I remember seeing Julia/Julie in our community rankings, and thinking it was a nice idea. Cooking good food every single day for a year is really a no-lose proposition. She didn't really participate in the community much that I could see, but then again, an obsession such as hers left little time for socializing.
I came out of the film a bit disappointed, however. This was not due to the Meryl Streep-as-Julia-Child sequences, which are brilliant, with a stellar supporting cast including a wonderful turn by Stanley Tucci as Julia's husband (it's very hard to portray an entirely loving and decent character well enough to maintain the audience's interest, but the screen lights up every time he's there).
No, my disappointment came from the strange treatment of the Julie Powell segments of the film. Early on, for example, we start easing into Julie's life as a bureaucrat in the agency responsible for dealing with the rebuilding of the twin towers site (keep in mind everything in the Powell sequences of the film takes place less than 2 years past 9/11). Powell's job appears to be to help people apply for victim funds, register opinions on the new buildings and the memorial, etc. Not exactly a trivial position, but one she clearly finds a bit soul-crushing. Fair enough. Yet the tone of the film seems almost mocking of the entire job - mocking to the point of making fun of 9/11 victims. Just strange.
There's an awkward scene in which Powell is lunching with some wealthy college classmates, all of whom seem truly odious and with no redeeming qualities whatsoever. Perhaps this is an east coast thing - where you continue to hang out with people like that? Or perhaps it's lazy filmmaking. I vote the latter.
But throughout, the Powell character comes off as self-absorbed and shallow, to the point of being truly trivial. Her life is so carelessly portrayed we are confused when her husband takes a short leave of absence - is he validating that she is shallow and trivial? If so, why isn't the audience allowed a fast forward button? If not, what on earth does his absence mean?
Powell's work in the blog was that of personal memoir. Personal memoir doesn't require a life like that of Julia Child to be successful. I recently read Patricia Hample's "The Florist's Daughter", in which nobody is a secret spy taking down Nazis (that would be Julie Child - no, really) nobody discovers penicillin, nobody invents the atom bomb. But that book still works on an artistic level that is quite rewarding.
Perhaps the director wanted to make Powell's life into more than it is, misunderstanding the nature of personal memoir. By attempting to make normal thirty-something anxieties seem comparable to Julie Child's extraordinary life and presence, they put Powell in competition with Child, and that is a competition she loses definitively. I would have liked to have seen the Powell sequences condensed and handled with more subtlety. And unfortunately, the use of Amy Adams - an actress who here speaks with a near monotone chipper princess voice (sorry, but there's a reason she got the lead in that Disney movie...) trivializes the blogger, the memoirist, even more, and pushes her over the edge into needy, self indulgent, and shallow. And Adams vs Streep? That dynamic is set up here as well - with the results predictable.
Powell's blog certainly accomplished more than she, or any of us watching her early on, ever anticipated. And one of the fun things about the film is that you can go read the blog yourself - frozen in time, it's all still there. By the rankings on Salon I can tell people are finding it as a result of the film. So this is an unusual circumstance in that the real-time spontaneous memoir upon which a film is based is actually still there for you to see (see link at beginning of this article). That alone makes this an interesting study of how things go from real life, to print, to screen. You can go back to the original source and see for yourself.
Above: My humble stove, with my favorite brand of fancy Italian olive oil.
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