Cooking up coalescence

Well, it has finally happened. Someone made a movie about a blog. Actually, someone has made a movie about a memoir by and about a blogger. But, because of the solipsistic, navel-gazing nature of blogging, it amounts to pretty much the same thing.

Based on true events, Julie & Julia recounts writer Julie Powell's invention and promulgation of The Julie/Julia Project, which featured her blog posts relating to her attempt to successfully prepare each of the 524 recipes in Julia Child's Mastering the Art of French Cooking in the space of 364 days. Child (the titular Julia, needless to say) is the focus of the film's subplot, which follows the famous TV chef and food writer from her early days as a student of French cooking in Paris to the completion of the influential tome that would make her name.

Make no mistake, the Child presented here is a fanciful creation, however faithful the relevant moments in the screenplay are to Child's memoir, My Life in France. Director Nora Ephron's rendering of Child is compelling but impossibly idyllic. Meryl Streep's performance in the role is the highlight of the film, but it is impossible to accept as fact her portrait of beatific patience, enthusiasm and benevolence. It seems unlikely that we're seriously expected to do so.

Streep acts from the outside in, bringing life to a vivid and well-known persona without making any serious effort to explore the real personality behind it. Stanley Tucci as Child's husband, Paul, is equally charming and equally unreal, seemingly living his married life from beginning to end in a saintly state of supportiveness and understanding.

Amy Adams' Powell is our protagonist, which is somewhat unfortunate, despite the actress's winsome enthusiasm. Powell's gimmick for her blog-cum-book-cum-biopic is clever and catching, at any rate, and it's hard not to sympathize with her as her life is rendered chaotic by the difficulties of balancing a marriage, a day job (taking calls from victims of 9/11 for the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation) and the Herculean task of working her way through Child's massive cookbook.

Ultimately, try as we might to get behind Powell as she struggles to meet her goal, the superficiality of the character precludes the possibility of cooking up much concern. As a writer and personality, the woman, both in life and on film, is shallow, workmanlike at best and maddeningly chirpy. Her artistic aims apparently amount to little more than a grab for recognition and remuneration. She's driven by self-doubt and low self-esteem, desperately seeking to redeem her status in the eyes of her successful mother and friends as though she had to live up to her own billing after announcing at some point in her youth a naive ambition to be a scribbler.

Powell's eventual landing of a book deal due to the public's interest in her project is left out of the film, except in the end notes. The narrative arc is more or less bound to the yearlong saga of cooking and blogging and the days leading up to it.

A movie based on a blog - and, as far as I know, this is the first - is a fine thing. Any time the written (or typed, as the case may be) word ends up inspiring a major motion picture is a victory for wordsmiths everywhere. It's too bad the pioneer for this particular path to success has to be a tiresome, alternately catty and petulant hack.

It is unsurprising to learn the real-life Child purportedly rejected Powell and her project. Prague Post contributor and online food writer Kate Lebo echoed the feelings of many in stating her wish that Ephron & Co. had instead made a similar film, sans "Julie." Julia, it must be said, would be a much more interesting subject on her own.

James Walling can be reached at
jwalling@praguepost.com