I saw "Julie and Julia," last night at a screening and was disappointed. Now that I have had time to marinate overnight, my disappointment has soured into annoyance.

Early in the film, and early on her path to becoming the world's most famous instructor of French cuisine, Julia Child laments having to convert metric measurements for an American audience. "Measurements are not important," her future co-author Simone Beck says. Julia Child replies. "I think they're very important."

I have to agree, and this is an ill-measured film. Before the lights go down, we are already more interested in the Julia Child story -- she's an icon, and therefore more interesting than a "cubicle worker" (more on that later), post-war Paris is more interesting than post-9/11 Queens, creating the first and most famous English-language book of French cooking is more interesting than re-creating it because your life bores you, and so on. What this movie needed to do was balance the Julia Child story by attempting to make the Julie Powell story even slightly interesting.

The movie that might have been made is the story of how these two women came into their own through "Mastering the Art of French Cooking," but what we have instead are lopsided servings of the sweet and the bitter. Meryl Streep swoops and whoops as Child in Paris, most of the time delivering a typically Streep-brilliant performance but occasionally lapsing into what my friend over at Head Butler http://www.headbutler.com/ calls "Big Bird Goes to Cordon Bleu." There are tantalizing hints of a life as rich as beurre blanc -- the years in the OSS, the investigation by McCarthy, the loud gawky American at soignee embassy parties -- along with long and completely unnecessary sideplots, such as the one involving the sister (although it was nice to see Jane Lynch having so much fun). But Ephron gives us just a taste, makes us want the meal, and then switches us to the microwave.

I have read Child's book and I haven't read Powell's, but Ephron's job, in bringing the stories together, was to find a balance.

So, Powell. The publicity material presents her as a "cubicle drone" looking to find herself as she approaches the milestone of turning 30. The cubicle in which she drones belongs to the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation, less than a year after September 11, 2001, and her job, fielding calls from survivors in need of health care, housing, and counseling, is presented as one of no meaning or importance, serving mainly to annoy her, to drive her into one of the many "meltdowns" she has throughout the film when things don't go her way. These hissy fits are meant to make her seem endearingly vulnerable but instead make her come across as petty and petulant. Long Island City, the working-class neighborhood in which she scorns to live, was particularly hard hit by the attacks of September 11, and even eleven months later was still bedecked with makeshift shrines to policemen and firemen.

I'm taking it too seriously, you say. It's a comedy. Well, here's my rule: use 9/11 as a plot point very judiciously, and use it as a backdrop at your own peril.

Regardless of how it unfolded in "real life," Ephron could have used the "drone job" to enhance the character of Julie: to show her setting forth on her adventure because life is short and you must make yourself happy, to show her cultivating cooking as a creative, nurturing act in response to the destruction she spends her nine-to-five time trying to mend.

But no, Julie launches a blog because all of her college friends have flashy positions and shiny gadgets and she was the promising one in college; she was going to be a writer; she has "thoughts." She does, in fact, have a lot going for her, which makes her all the more exasperating. She has, for one thing, a bewilderingly loving husband who endures her constant jibes that she has "nothing," her sulking when no one reads her blog and her tantrum over a ruined stew to such an extent that his final breaking point provides the only crisis in the B plot. Even Julie must finally overcome her self-absorption to recognize that her husband is a sweetheart.

That seems to be Powell's "lesson learned" and it's not enough. By that time I had lost the little interest I had in whether or not she succeeded in cooking her way through "Mastering the Art of French Cooking" in 365 days and waited for the scenes of Child shepherding her cookbook to publication, although that, too, failed to compel because we all know how it turns out.

I had to content myself with trying to figure out where Julie Powell was as she whined her way through Queens. That place where she buys the lobster? That's my fish store.

Labels: Julie and Julia, Queens, September 11

posted by Elizabeth at 10:30 PM