Atlantic City Weekly

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While you don’t have to be addicted to the Food Network, love to cook and be a fan of Julia Child to enjoy Julie & Julia, Nora Ephron’s delicious tribute to Child and her foodie blogger fan Julie Powell, it certainly helps. Since I qualify in all three categories, this charming, low-key parallel story of two women who never met, yet find common ground in kitchens continents and decades apart, delighted my critical taste buds.

Writer-director Ephron takes us to post-war Paris where we meet Julia and Paul Child (Meryl Streep, Stanley Tucci). He works for the United States Foreign Service; Julia, retired from her job working for the wartime OSS (Office of Strategic Services), is looking for something to keep her occupied. Her favorite pastime is eating, so she decides to learn how to cook French cuisine and dives in passionately at her class at Le Cordon Bleu, surrounded by snobby Frenchmen.

In a parallel story, we meet New Yorker Julie Powell (Amy Adams), a woman who isn’t happy about her life. About to turn 30, she is frustrated that she doesn’t have a real career, just a job, while many of her college friends are moving up in the world. She has a loving husband, Eric (Chris Messina), who supports her desire to start a blog and even suggests the topic, cooking.

Powell, whose career path has been stalled in the past by her giving up on an idea prematurely, decides that she will cook all 524 recipes from Julia Child’s groundbreaking 1961 cookbook, Mastering the Art of French Cooking, in 365 days.

With these twin stories intertwined, Ephron whips up a sweet and occasionally tangy tale that is guaranteed to make you hungry, or at the very least, send you to the store to pick up the ingredients for Julia’s signature dish Boeuf Bourguignon.

Admittedly, the Julia side of the story is more fascinating than the more mundane tale of blogger Julie, but despite a trend that could throw the story out of balance, Ephron manages to keep this cinematic soufflé from collapsing. Just when you’re feeling that Julie is getting a bit annoying with her woe-is-me act, it’s back to Europe where we can savor the genius of Streep whipping her high-pitched Julia accent into a froth as she chops a mountain of onions into submission.

Then Ephron cheats a little bit by giving us a chance to roar with laughter as Julie and Eric watch the classic 1978 sketch from Saturday Night Live featuring Dan Aykroyd as Julia Child, pressing on despite a gushing wound on his/her thumb.

Amy Adams is fine as Julie, but her character isn’t nearly as interesting as Streep’s Julia. The sequences with Streep and Tucci (who is superb as Child’s devoted spouse) could stand up as a movie on their own, while I doubt Julie Powell would be movie worthy without her connection to a culinary legend.

That said, it was Julie’s inspired cooking that led to a popular blog, that led to a popular book, a book that inspired Ephron to put the life of Julia Child on the big screen, thereby giving the incandescent Streep the opportunity to add Julia Child to her mountain of unforgettable performances.

Bon Appetit!

Julie & Julia***
Written & directed by Nora Ephron; rated PG13

To read more about movies and other topics covered by movie critic Lori Hoffman under her blog alias Moviejunkie, visit http://blog.acweekly.com/