Julie & Julia
USA 2009 123 minutes
Director: Nora Ephron
Starring: Meryl Streep, Amy Adams and Stanley Tucci
Nominations and Awards
• Oscar nomination for Best Actress (Meryl Streep)
• BAFTA nomination for Best Actress (Meryl Streep)
• A further 10 wins and 12 nominations
“...the two lives hang together and the experiences of their heroines placed alongside each other offer revelations about social and cultural change over the past 60 years, from the staid age of the telex and the manual typewriter to the ubiquity of the personal computer and the mobile phone.”
Philip French
In 2002 Julie Powell (Amy Adams), a young writer with an unpleasant day job in New York decides to enjoy herself by cooking every recipe in Mastering the Art of French Cooking (1961) by Julia Childs while blogging to document her progress. In a parallel story set in Paris in the 1950s Julia Childs (Meryl Streep) attends Le Cordon Bleu to learn about French cooking and begins work on a book about this for American housewives. After a mention of her blog in an article in The New York Times Powell is courted by a succession of journalists, literary agents and publishers, culminating in the publication of a best-selling book.
It was Streep who received the majority of the nominations and awards for her acting, but the performance of all three actors in the main roles was central to the success of the film, and these carry echoes of other films the actors have appeared in. Julie begins to regard Julia as a mother figure and a source of inspiration to her, a relationship that echoes their roles in Doubt (2008) where Streep played the Mother Superior and Amy Adams the young nun. In a similar happy accident of casting, Stanley Tucci as Julia’s humorous and considerate husband Paul, also played the devoted gay associate of Streep’s fashion magazine editor in The Devil Wears Prada (2006).
In a career of more than 25 years Nora Ephron, initially as scriptwriter and subsequently as director, has been responsible for many successful films from Silkwood (1983) (starring Streep), Heartburn (1986) (once again with Streep) and When Harry Met Sally (1989) to Sleepless in Seattle (1993) and You’ve Got Mail (1998). Several of these films focus on people leading parallel lives, but for Julie & Julia she takes this plot structure to a different level by having them live in different periods and never meet, a structure that Stephen Daldry used for dramatic rather than comic effect in The Hours which followed the lives of three women (played by Nicole Kidman, Julianne Moore and Meryl Streep again) whose only link was Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway.
Streep received her sixteenth Oscar nomination for her performance in this film. Her next performance will be as Margaret Thatcher in The Iron Lady with Phyllida Lloyd, who previously directed Streep in Mamma Mia! (2008), as director and also starring Anthony Head as Geoffrey Howe and Richard E Grant as Michael Heseltine.
