Julie & Julia," the twinned tale of a groundbreaking cookbook queen, Julia Child (Meryl Streep), and a contemporary blogger, Julie Powell (Amy Adams), proves to be wacky, engaging entertainment. Writer-director Nora Ephron ("Sleepless in Seattle") fills it with colorful, mismatched parts. Happily, her fondness for the subject matter seals the rifts. For my money, this movie is by far her spriest and most likable achievement.
Child, in heady postwar Paris, enters an all-male class at Le Cordon Bleu and later, with French friends, prepares her chef d'oeuvre. She breaks barriers of international sexism and American cooking traditions with unself-conscious esprit. Powell, a government cubicle worker living in Long Island City, N.Y., starts the Julie/Julia blog, chronicling her preparation of all 524 recipes in Child's "Mastering the Art of French Cooking" in a single year, to prove to herself that she has similar gumption and follow-through.
Powell's progress as a writer and a cook provides the movie's frame; she's touching in her attempt to stick to something when she's generally floundering. With warm imagery and clever narrative elisions, "Julie & Julia" glides easily between Child's and Powell's stories. To some viewers, these two characters will mark the difference between true grit (Child) and faux grit (Powell). The fault doesn't lie in these characters but in the contrast between the vibrant, fully fleshed-out France of the flashbacks and the hollow mingling of melancholy and careerism in Ephron's portrait of New York a year or two after Sept. 11.
