Julie & Julia – Movie Review

Like most of your best movies, Julie & Julia isn’t at all about what it’s about. That’s probably going to trouble a certain number of moviegoers, who are looking for a food movie, or have certain expectations because it’s a Nora Ephron film. It tells the story of Julia Child’s trip to becoming an icon, and Julie Powell’s road to somewhat accidentally becoming a popular blogger and author. It also shows the lives that surround these two women on their respective journeys, and the men who travel with them. The movie gives us these things, but it isn’t particularly about them.

We enter with Julie waxing uhappily about the tiny apartment above a pizza parlor which she shares with her husband, and JuliaJulia reviews flitting through her new, gorgeous home in ParisParis reviews which is a product of her husband’s four-year assignment. Julie is anything but fulfilled at this point. A self-procalimed failed writer, Julie has had to return to “real work,” and her days in a cubicle answering the phone aren’t quite doing it for her. Julia is a wife in an age and situation wherein wives, according to her, didn’t do anything. Learning bridge isn’t her speed or style, and she has another reason that unfilled time is especially unfilled for her. Both women teeter on the edge of a fairly serious identity crisis, and they look for a way out via roughly the same means.

Julie looks around at her life, and manages little more than an uncertain glare. Julia, in her bursting with joy way, takes stock of her new Parisian place in the world, and asks her husband, “But, what should I do?” Perhaps establishing a certain male/female perspective play the film wants to toy with occasionally, her husband replies, “About what?” Though not generally unhappy, these two not-so-young-anymore women aren’t exactly sure what a satisfying life might be, but they know this ain’t it.

Though the literature may suggest finding out what makes you happy and doing it, these women choose instead to decide what makes them happy and go at it come hell or high water. It’s a tricky distinction, but one that makes all the difference.

As the story plays out, both women run into initial difficulties, then have a good bit of success. That success by way of a few people validating their existence. They then stumble a bit again, soldier on, and then meet with quite a lot of success. But after that… and not at all because of it, they look at themselves in the mirror a little differently.

This is an especially fun point in fact, because it rather nods at Ephron herself. Some early success (not brilliant, but successful) followed by a period of stumbles and trying to work through, and ultimately (one hopes) a place of satisfaction.

Ephron is wonderfully matured in the working of these characters, and their interactions. While too much praise cannot be given to Meryl Streep or Amy Adams for their powerfully quirky performances, this is Ephron’s show.

There is a scene in which the movie makes a certain commentary on gender differences by way of Julie asking if it’s okay to hate your friends. A man answers that men don’t hate their friends, and we’re done. The Ephron of the smart and fun, but ultimately unpolished and unsure of itself When Harry Met SallyWhen Harry Met Sally… reviews would feel the need to take the further step of saying what it’s saying here, and we’d have a speech about how men don’t even understand the question. This Ephron is confident in herself and her audience.

Another scene finds Julie and her husband Eric reuniting after a fight which ended with Eric briefly leaving the household. Julie simply looks at him, magnificently sad, scared, and happy, and asks, “Are you back? Please say you’re back.” Eric pauses briefly and asks, “What’s for dinner?” The Ephron of the tedious, but more or less watchable SleeplessSleepless reviews in Seattle, or worse, its bizarre bastard step-child You’ve Got MailYou’ve Got Mail reviews would not be able to eschew the great song and dance here. This Ephron wants to talk about real people, and the statement does not deny that some people act that way.

By now it probably seems strange that I suggest this movie is not about these women, and moreover that it isn’t particularly about their lives either. But, it isn’t. Nor is it about what love is, or what people are, though it must use these ideas. It is about what loving people is. It is about love as, in the case of loving oneself or one’s partner, deciding what makes us happy and doing that.

It is about finding great success in being “that which aids in your success,” and feeling far greater joy in your partner’s success than in your own. Not because now there is money, or fame, or any such trivialities, but simply because that is a new smile.

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