iii3/5
Like a bowl of congee, Julie & Julia gives an instant hit of emotional comfort. In this true story, the hard work pays off, people love each other and, like in real life, there's no neat, Hollywood ending. In a world where people are expected to be able to do everything, yet master nothing, it's reassuring to see two women, separated by decades, strive for a goal and reach it.
Julia Child (Meryl Streep) arrives in post-war Paris with her husband Paul (Stanley Tucci), and finds herself bored. She decides to learn to cook French food, braves the chauvinistic world of Le Cordon Bleu school, struggles for years to write a cookbook and becomes a household name.
Julie, played by the cute-as-a-button Amy Adams, works in a cubicle and lives above a pizzeria in post-9/11 New York. She wants a change, and to literally whip herself into shape: she decides to make every recipe in Child's cookery bible, Mastering the Art of French Cooking, in a year.
She starts a blog about her culinary adventure and steadily gains a following as the lives of Julie and Julia become intertwined in one magical story.
Streep's Julia is witty and cheerful, a woman of strong backbone, who finds everyone charming and in turn is loved by all. Adams, on the other hand, plays a woman trying to cope with a career, cramped living conditions and stifling friends, and who becomes more than a little obsessed with her goal.
Julie & Julia is now showing