Julie & Julia
To those in the know, if I tell you Julie & Julia is a typical Nora Ephron movie, you will no doubt conjur the usual state of affairs. Never lacking in handling matters of the heart or the inner workings of the complicate female psyche, this story of a book that inspired a blog that inspired a challenge that inspired a movie is, dare I say, in need of further inspiration.
To be fair to Ephron, there is only a limited amount of things you could do with this, and what appears to come out of it is a jumbled pastiche of likeable moments and fine acting performances, which is probably all you could ever have really have hoped for.
Not having the blindest clue who either Julie or Julia were prior to watching the film, I spent the first twenty minutes assuming we were watching two sides of an interconnected story in the same time frame. I can therefore easily be accused of not paying full attention. Oscar vehicles for Hollywood stars are never something I have easily warmed to and this is so obvious an example of that slightly grisly industry sideline, that I can be forgiven for rolling my eyes metaphorically at the screen, when along comes Meryl, all five feet two inches of her, trying to fill the shoes of a woman twelve inches taller than her in heels that seem to make her walk like an uncomfortable transvestite after a rather hurried vasectomy in his lunch-hour.
Still then, more informed minds than mine can only decide if she mimics Childs well enough to warrant plaudits for her performance. Certainly the film is entertaining and both Adams and Streep deliver what can be described as value for money.
Stanley Tucci, in the second film of his I’ve seen this week is probably more convincing than either of them however, and if Streep is to get yet another Oscar nomination for this, there is no reason why Tucci shouldn’t receive the same.
I can’t help feeling that with Oscar season drawing near, and getting the buzz on those films that are doing well in the jostle for the final places that we are dumbing down. ‘You’ve Got Mail’ and ‘Sleepless in Seattle’ both fit conveniently in the Ephron stable here with this effort, but would you honestly guess either of those other two Ephron films would be worthy of a Best Picture Oscar? Well, neither of them won one and both are arguably better films than this. If that is true, then you would have to guess that this film receives its credibility only from Streep herself. Whether she can be said to be holding the film on her own, however, is something else.
All in all, being blunt, this is pedestrian fare. Not too shameful but it never reaches any heights. It may have been the subject matter that passed me by, but even the story and it’s telling comes off as lacklustre and lacking in enough Ephron stalwarts, like heart, to do your time justice.
