Julie & Julia

City Paper Grade: C+

by Cindy Fuchs

CHILD'S PLAY: Meryl Streep delights as Julia Child in Nora Ephron's Julie & Julia.

[City Paper Grade: C+]

When Julia Child (a delightful Meryl Streep) arrives in Paris in 1949, she brings her station wagon. It's a small but telling detail at the beginning of Julie & Julia. Like everything else about her, the car is ungainly in its new setting, lowered by ropes from a ship, too big for the streets leading to the apartment where she and her diplomat husband, Paul (Stanley Tucci), will live for the next few years. And yet, as Paul narrates, no matter her difference in size and affect from her new neighbors, Julia charms nearly everyone — in the hallways, at the street market, at official parties and in her cooking class at the Cordon Bleu.

Julia's outrageous charisma is also the main appeal of Nora Ephron's movie. When it cuts away from her to the other titular character, Julie (Amy Adams), it loses energy; Julie seems more a distraction than a focus. This is partly a function of the different lives portrayed: Julia is boisterous and breaks all kinds of political and cultural ground back in the '50s and '60s, while Julie lives in Queens and works in a cubicle, taking phone calls from victims of 9/11. Determined to find her own "voice," she decides to cook her way through Mastering the Art of French Cooking, and blog about it for salon.com. Suffice it to say that her adventure is not nearly as compelling as Child's.

The movie works hard to balance their differences in rhythm and energy, showing how each has a supportive husband (Julie's is Eric, played by Chris Messina) and matched passions for cooking and writing. Each woman also keeps close female relationships. Julia's are via lively letters to her sister Dorothy (Jane Lynch) and dear friend Avis (Deborah Rush) back in the States, and Julie's through the more mundane rom-commy device — the amusing confidant (an underused Mary Lynn Rajskub). Unfortunately, Julie's sometimes whiny, often self-indulgent infatuation with all things Julia is not so amusing.