Ten Years Ago: Julie & Julia

Max DeCurtins takes a critical look back at Julie & Julia’s nostalgia for past ways of being, slathered in butter and Meryl Streep.

Well, loyal 10YA readers, here we are again: I’m writing a re-view of a food-centric movie while trying to lose the weight I gained back after having lost it once already…after having written about trying to lose weight in a re-view of a food-centric movie. Before we get into discussing Julie & Julia, director Nora Ephron’s last film before her death in 2012, let us take a moment to process the fact that When Harry Met Sally recently celebrated its 30th anniversary. Sleepless in Seattle isn’t far behind, with that anniversary coming up in 2023. Ephron wrote and produced the former, and co-wrote and directed the latter, and their status as cultural touchstones is undeniable: thirty years later, women still go to Katz’s to fake an orgasm. I mention this to highlight the late Ephron’s impeccable sense of pacing…for a pre-Web 2.0 world.

Sundry netizens, I give you: Julie & Julia, Or: Let’s Make Movies Like it’s 1994.

I first saw this movie in one of those very corporate-aesthetic outdoor shopping mall-cum-movie theaters, the likes of which are numerous in SoCal. I was in Irvine, visiting a college friend (with whom I’ve long since lost touch) shortly before moving to Boston. I may also be pointing out this fact because, as I prepare to observe ten years of living in Boston, I’m dimly aware that I’ve never gone so long without being in SoCal. Julie & Julia, rather inadvertently, has become one of those movies—and everyone has at least one—that can’t help but remind you that your life is different now. I remember liking it chiefly as an artifact of food and kitchen porn, and on this, my dear Reader, I’m sure we are in agreement:

The food porn part is still valid, just in case you were wondering. Also, “food stylist” is an actual job, and you can get paid for it. Commence questioning of life choices in 3…2…

But let’s talk about the actual plot of Julie & Julia, such as it is.

Julie (Amy Adams) is just your basic white girl New Yorker with New England academic credentials (Amherst College—small, picturesque, liberal arts) working in corporate America for the quaint reason that being a Professional Fiction Writer is hard, and not because she has Faustian levels of student debt, which 2019 Julie would definitely have. She has a supportive husband, Eric (Chris Messina), a bestie Sarah (Mary Lynn Rajskub), and a group of leftover college friends she hates but ritualistically still sees occasionally. If there’s anything that feels real about Julie’s story ten years later, it’s that she works a bullshit job and lives in a dingy apartment over a pizzeria in Queens. Also that, allusions to Sex and the City aside, Julie’s vapid Cobb salad posse actually represents something that every early-thirty-something suspects: that the relatively bland people you met in high school or college have somehow ended up more financially secure, with more vacation time, less stress, and strategically placed, vomit-inducing jargon like “thought leader” on their résumés. They were Good Capitalists, making Good Capitalist Choices. (Being white, heterosexual, conventionally attractive, and presumably from families of relative means probably helped.)

Feeling aimless, and in the grip of the delayed aftershock of a quarter-life crisis that hits as she turns 30, Julie decides that she’s going to focus herself by spending a whole year cooking every single recipe in Julia Child’s landmark cookbook Mastering the Art of French Cooking—unforgiving work hours and crumbling New York public transit be damned. Now, I love French cuisine, but on behalf of all Millennials, everywhere:

Somewhere along the way, after Julie has had to contend with the logistics of cooking lobsters and an aspic meltdown, a food writer for the New York Times takes notice of her project and does a profile. It is this sudden fame that will lead Julie to write the book that ultimately inspires the present film.

Let’s just get the obvious part out of the way: Julie’s story was never going to be able to compete with Julia’s. Meryl Streep, with her approximately 18 million Academy Awards, inhabits Julia Child to perfection, vocal yodel-cavorting and all. Stanley Tucci, himself no lightweight, brings sartorial sensibility to the mix as Paul Child. Watch Julie & Julia for them, if for no other reason. (Or just watch the Julia-only supercut of the film.) Even if you disagree with the criticism of Adams as a weak casting choice, it was always going to be hard to make anyone stand out against Streep. The reason for this feels equally obvious: if you get down to the nuts and bolts of the parallels that Julie Powell draws between herself and Child, it all starts to look rather silly.

Consider, as an example, Julie’s bit of voiceover (borrowing again, we might note, from Sex and the City) following her fight with Eric. She’s describing her bout of introspection that comes on the heels of a dinner date gone wrong—she was due to host Judith Jones, the A.A. Knopf editor responsible for getting Mastering the Art of French Cooking published. Jones, alas, cancels at the last minute. Blogging her way through her feelings, Julie offers some similarities between herself and Julia Child, one of which is: “A really nice guy married her; a really nice guy married me.” For reals.

Citing this as evidence of your connection is roughly like finding someone else on OKStupid who likes Italian food and going: “Wow! We have so much in common!”

I never read Powell’s actual book, but I suspect that the most interesting thing about her blog (and her book) is the way in which, not unlike the contributors to this esteemed blog, Julie reflects on her personal growth through an uncommon lens—cooking—just as we reflect here at 10YA through film. Unfortunately, this is the piece that seems most absent from the movie, beyond some trite pages from the playbook of White Girl Realizes She’s a Grown-Ass Person. Her half of the movie finds Julie at her most splenetic, which eventually just breeds annoyance on the viewer’s part—and it’s not because she consistently mispronounces boeuf as boof. (Fact: every time you say boof instead of boeuf, a French person dies.) It’s because, like making hollandaise the traditional way after a full day at work, ain’t nobody got time for a chronically mopey, peevish character, whether said person is a coworker, friend, or roommate.

I get it, though: renting sucks—and subpar kitchens suck even more. As I slowly begin the long and probably torturous process of trying to buy a condo in Boston’s absurd, laughably expensive real estate market, there’s nothing I dream of more than not having to share a kitchen. Ten years later, and older than Julie is supposed to be in Julie & Julia, I can conclusively report that, when it comes to most other things, I am far happier giving many fewer fucks, and if there’s one thing I would wish for Julie, it’s that she find her way to the same place.

It’s not, however, the extreme imbalance between the Julie and Julia storylines that makes this film such a mixed bag in 2019. It’s the fact that everything—but everything—about this movie feels quaint.

Loyal 10YA readers may remember me as an unrepentant Francophile. Julia Child’s France epitomizes quaintness; it remains blissfully untouched by climate change, Algerian migration, or the impossible logistics of Brexit. (It also conveniently ignores France’s postwar reconstruction.) We are no longer in an era of small-town Europe, of modestly populated boulevards and independent épiceries. Bow-tied waiters are not bringing you sole meunière in $250 elliptical copper pans and deboning it tableside. Going to a bistro dressed in a coat and tie, and having a conversation over good food without having to yell over the ambient noise, the other patrons, and the deafening playlist feels like an impossibility. Nobody is shopping at a greenmarket, a boulangerie, a fromagerie, and a boucherie within the span of a week, let alone a single day. It’s not that I don’t want this, you see. It’s just that those things came with a world that was considerably more problematic and narrow-minded, not unlike the stodgy townspeople of Chocolat. (Twentieth anniversary next year. Feeling old yet?)

There’s an interesting tension in Paul’s constant support of Julia, even as her circumstances depend entirely on the circumstances of his assignment. In some ways it feels very woke, and thus very current, to watch how Paul never feels threatened by Julia’s success. But the quaintness is never very far behind: Paul’s political squabbles with Julia’s father over Joe McCarthy pale and wither in comparison to today’s atavistic cesspool.

The score does nothing to dispel the quaint feels, either. Let’s just say it: The music in this movie is stupid AF. Anodyne little waltz tune in 1; omnipresent accordion reminding you: dis French musique, oui? The peppy cues for Julie’s New York of 2002 sound like a sweetly serifed font and bubble bath, or like montage music for an early-’90s travel sequence. Desplat has done a fair number of major film scores, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button among them, but for some curious reason he sounds at his laziest when it comes to music from his home country.

But most of all, Julie & Julia feels extra quaint because it describes how one might have “gone viral” in Ye Olden Days—with some mild buzz that catches the attention of an outfit like the New York Times. Today, and for the last almost-decade, “going viral” is something that happens on YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram; that Julie garners a following through her blog, a medium primarily for long-form writing, feels very dated, even though it once was very much possible to become minor-league famous this way.

Put it all together—the quaintness of Julie’s frustrations, plot triggers that happen primarily through letters and phone calls, the sweetly banal, mildly playful musical score—and you end up with a comprehensive quaintness that feels like a throwback to the feel-good comedies and rom-coms of the early 1990s, a time when the future seemed brighter and the present just modern enough to make life comfortable. The inhabitants of Julie Powell’s 2002 aren’t devastatingly cynical about the internet; for them, the internet is still a quasi-magical place, devoid of physicality but full of possibilities—we haven’t yet turned to memes and emoji as ways of coping with late-stage capitalism and entrenched governmental dysfunction. I remember this time and this feeling—or maybe I just remember the hisses and pops of a dial-up connection—but that Julie approaches the internet like this in a post-9/11 world just feels…quaint.

In the end, ten years later, what’s left is a film that feels so strongly like an artifact of the early ’90s that it only makes me feel that much worse about the state of the world in 2019, when calamities are never more than a tweet away and it’s a weekly, if not daily, struggle not to feel completely overwhelmed by, well, everything. Still, Julie & Julia has its moments, and at least one relevant piece of advice, no matter when you watch it—you can never have too much butter.

— Max DeCurtins