When Meryl Streep started out her career in film in 1977, her first film was called Julia. Thirty two years on, she plays a very different Julia, TV chef Julia Child, famous for making French cooking accessible to the average American household.
Meryl Streep Hilarious as Julia Child
The larger-than-life role of Julia Child could only have been taken on by an actress with the charisma and vitality that Meryl Streep possesses on-screen. In every scene Julia Child is portrayed with outrageous eccentricity right down to every mannerism. Her accented “They absolutely dooo” is reminiscent of a time when proper pronunciation was valued highly and her atrocious French is always good for a laugh.
Streep is rarely allowed the freedom to play such a humorous character, although there is plenty of humour in the work that she does, and she takes to it with great ability. It seems that she is limitlessly flexibile as an actress and her perfectionist’s ability to impersonate any accent is quite exceptional.
Ever committed to the role, Streep put on 15 pounds as she prepared for the task of playing the legendary chef. Julia Child is seen eating a lot of food in the film and, in one scene, she has a gigantic pile of onions in front of her, so perhaps that was also slightly responsible!
Julie Powell – Blogger Turned Film-Star
When Julie Powell sat down to write her first blog of the Julie/Julia project in 2003, she did not imagine that a few years later she would be seeing herself on the big screen played by Amy Adams. The blog became a worldwide phenomenon, with over two hundred comments responding to some posts. It is not the first self-publishing initiative to make it big, but it will go down as a landmark in movie history.
The film follows the interconnected lives of Julia Child and a young writer Julie Powell who lives about forty years later. While Julia Child’s life is interesting and packed with flavour, Julie’s is somewhat dry. She often gives up on her writing projects and as a result has to admit to her successful friends that she is not earning in the same league they are.
So Julie decides she will complete something – a year following the recipes of Julia Child, her idol. And every day, she writes a blog about it. At first, although this sounds like a big challenge, it is manageable. However, soon, her whole life begins to be drawn into the Julie/Julia project and her marriage, friendships and her job are all put under threat.
The film ends as the blog does, with the revelation that Julia Childs does not approve of Julie Powell’s blog. It seems like an incredibly strange ending, made more bizarre in that it is not contrived, but real life. After such a feel-good build up, the wind is knocked completely from the sails of the film and not even a sentimental final scene can rescue the anti-climactic disappointment.
However, if the real Julia Childs thought the blog was unnecessarily crude and stood against the hard work that she had to put in to get to her fame and status, the readers of the blog found it stimulating and inspiring and, for one moment perhaps, it brought a lot of people together.
Julie and Julia DVD ISBN: 9780141043982
