Hollywood has a nag of taking real life stories and converting it into reel life stories. Julie & Julia is one such story, or should I say two such stories about two main protagonists Julia Child (Meryl Streep) and Julie Powell (Amy Adams) whose lives are set apart 50 years. The movie portrays the situations that both the females face in-spite of being generations apart and the fact that while generations separate the two and the world has seen tremendous progress, how somehow the environment around the two females create similar challenges for them. The story is a first hand account by Julie Powell and how she gets inspired by Julia Child's cook book "Mastering the Art of French Cooking (1962)" and goes on a 1 year journey that changes her life to say the least.
The movie tracks the lives of Julia and Julie in parallel, switching back and forth between 1950's and 2002. Julie Powell(2002) is a government insurance official who is unhappy with her job, and that starts to reflect on her personal relationships including that with her husband. She is encouraged by her husband to start a blog to take up a challenge to recreate Julia's 524 recipes from her cook book. So the blog is created, challenge is taken to complete 524 recipes in 365 days. While Julie is trying to discover her flair in cooking, the movie also tracks the life of Julia (1950's) and how she ended up actually creating one of the best cook books written on French cooking. Julia is posted in Paris with her husband and on being unable to find a good French Cooking book in English, decides to learn French cooking taking cooking classes. One thing leads to another in her journey of learning cooking, and she starts writing a book herself.
Interestingly the movie tracks Julia's life for couple of decades where as only an year of Julie's. In this one year, Julie ends up experiencing some of the situation that Julia found herself in, almost half a century back. What is interesting is that both these stories are based on separate books actually written by Julie and Julia on their lives. The director has taken two autobiographies and beautifully entangled them together. A unique idea, and it comes out really well. While the duration of the movie is around 2 hours, it does go on a very constant pace.
Characterization wise, Meryl Streep is tremendous in her role as Julia Child, playing it almost to perfection. She does not seem to do anything wrong. She has created the demur of Julia Child ( 6 feet plus) fantastically. She actually wore huge heals in order to remove the 6 - 8 inches height different between her and the actual Julia Child. Amy Adams is decent in her portrayal of Julie Powell. We also have Stanley Tucci as the back bone for Julia supporting her in her journey throughout, which he plays quiet well.
The story also tries to handle the long discussed question, "Should one do, what he/she likes?" or "Should one like, what he/she does?". Interestingly there are frustrations in both, as is evident in the movie. When one tries to like what they are doing, they get frustrated slowly and steadily, while when you try to do what you like, even a small failure leads to big frustrations. Clearly there are no perfect answers, as there are no perfect situations.
Julie & Julia is not a perfect movie, and neither does it perfectly capture the lives of its protagonists. But then, who cares till the time you get to see some unbelievable performances, specially by Meryl Streep. I would highly recommend watching it on DVD's, but keep in mind, that the movie goes on a slow pace and on a single track, with no major ups and downs.
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