A second helping of Julia Child

The new Nora Ephron movie, Julie and Julia, intertwines “two true stories” — that of cookbook writer and TV celebrity chef Julia Child and young, post-9/11 blogger Julie Powell, who attempted, over the course of one year, to replicate the 524 recipes in Child’s 1961 book Mastering the Art of French Cooking.

As Child, Meryl Streep summons a few of her seasoned verbal and physical tics and still manages to be the most truthy thing onscreen. Playing a six-foot US embassy man’s wife in 1949 Paris, she puts on the graceful awkwardness of a very tall woman. Her comic eye rolling is impossible to ignore, even at the margins of any scene she’s in, but somehow she never upstages her co-actors. It’s obviously a “fun” role for Streep, and she enjoys herself immensely.

Amy Adams plays Powell, an unpublished writer who works by day in a help line office in Lower Manhattan, taking phone calls from distraught family members of 9/11 victims. At lunch, she sits with high-powered college friends who, even in 2001, are making power calls on their cell phones in restaurants, and who look upon her “social work” pitiably. At night, she lives in a small Queens apartment with her husband and tries to decide what to do with her life. In the manner of most Gen-X and post-Gen-X young people, she decides that she must become famous — fast.

Her husband tells her to write a blog. She says all she likes doing all day is reading Julia Child’s 1961 cookbook. Blog about that, he says. Thus, she undertakes her mission, one recipe at a time.

It’s the kind of knowingly clever, postmodern idea that has launched a thousand blog sites, and you can see why it clicks. Basically, people will take an online interest in anything that’s already famous. Pairing her own daily struggles with the struggle to cook one or more recipes a day, Powell gets lots of email, a write-up in The New York Times, a book deal, and finally a movie (this one) about her stunt.

Of course, it’s not all smooth sailing. Her sudden blog fame makes her self-absorbed; she has fights with her hubby and seemingly spends more time at the office looking at her blog mail than answering 9/11 victims’ queries.

Meanwhile, Julia Child, back in Paris in the early ‘50s, struggles to overcome chauvinism at Le Cordon Bleu, teaches French cooking to American expats, and teams up with a couple French chef-teachers to craft what turns out to be a magnum opus — packaging French cuisine for the American masses in one cookbook. These are difficult dishes, requiring hours and hours and lots of butter. Still, Child loves to cook. Her husband is questioned during the Joe McCarthy era, they have to move around from city to city, but she labors to complete her cookbook, and after several rejections, it is published in the US.

This is a light, frothy movie meant for popcorn enjoyment. Stanley Tucci is sympathetic, playing a husband who can’t enter his own kitchen because Julia is slicing up a mountain of onions. We don’t really know what went on in their marriage, but Ephron is no babe in the woods on that subject (see: Heartburn).

Though it smears a Hollywood gloss over the true details of either couple’s relationship, Ephron’s screenplay is sharp enough to recognize there’s some meat here for discussion. Though she tries to parallel the difficulties the two couples face — conceiving children, marital pressures, career pressures — the scales of achievement come out subtly in favor of Child. Duh! Why? Because, when you come right down to it, what did Julia Child do? She wrote a successful cookbook. And what did Julie Powell do? She read a successful cookbook.

One can’t help noticing the cultural devolution at work here — a narrowing of talent, ability and originality — as we move from 1949 to 2001, when Powell began her blog. People no longer seem capable of coming up with something big or original; indeed, it’s so much easier to piggyback on what’s famous, filtering it through a snarky/self-absorbed/ironic blog consciousness. Here’s an example: if you put your wedding video on YouTube with no music (or your own, unknown music), no one will watch it; if you pair the video with music by Kanye West or Black Eyed Peas (and put those artists’ names among your search “key words”), you’ll get a thousand hits instantly. Then the record labels will pull the video because you didn’t pay any royalties or ask permission to use the song. It’s just easier for today’s crop of online “innovators” to appropriate and comment on what’s come before rather than staking out any new territory.

In fact, you can imagine any number of blogs cropping up, based on beloved books. A year could be spent replicating the exploits of Hunter S. Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (probably not a sound idea). People have tried — online — to retrace the footsteps of Leopold Bloom in James Joyce’s Ulysses. Someone has no doubt attempted a blog paralleling the downward spiral of Holden Caulfield in The Catcher in the Rye — from getting kicked out of private school to staying in a grungy hotel in Times Square to meeting up with a young hooker to walking around frozen Central Park looking for ducks. It’s a questionable habit of our/this generation: looking backward ironically and calling it a “Eureka!” moment. It would be interesting to pair this movie with a screening of Robert Redford’s Quiz Show, another movie that, though set in the 1950s, criticizes the modern habit of taking shortcuts to success: young Colombia professor Charles Van Doren forsakes academe to answer obscure questions on a TV quiz show, though he’s been fed the answers already: he is simply regurgitating history, and taking the credit. Sounds familiar, no?

Does Julie and Julia hate bloggers? No, but Julia Child just might have; she found Powell’s online project “disrespectful.” Of course, the 90-plus chef was retired and living in Cambridge, Massachusetts by 2001. You couldn’t expect her to applaud someone who, basically, did an extended riff on the contents of her cookbook. Ephron’s script, to be purely postmodern, should have taken up the thread of Child’s beef: why did she disdain Powell’s blog success? Possibly for the same reasons we in the “old media” might scratch our heads in puzzlement: she doesn’t seem to have earned it.