"Julie & Julia"

Stephanie Zacharek — Fri, 07 Aug 2009 03:18:00 PDT

When an actor plays a real-life character we know and love, we always hope for verisimilitude, for body movements that capture the physical essence of a person we feel we know pretty well, for line readings that conjure the tone and timber of a particular voice and its speech patterns (that is, for line readings that make us forget there's such a thing as "line readings"). A good actor can usually give us an exacting impersonation, a strictly followed recipe with every ingredient appropriately calibrated, and sometimes that's good enough. But watching Meryl Streep as Julia Child in "Julie & Julia" -- as she only semi-successfully flips an omelette, in a re-created clip from Child's seminal '60s-era television show "The French Chef"; as she stands at a table with her classmates at Le Cordon Bleu, her elbows crooked jauntily and a little awkwardly behind her; as she sits down to dinner with her husband, Paul (Stanley Tucci), the two of them having so much to say to each other that they sometimes chatter with their mouths full -- goes beyond recipe reading. Streep isn't playing Julia Child here, but something both more elusive and more truthful -- she's playing our idea of Julia Child. When Streep's Julia nearly loses that omelette on TV, she pooh-poohs the possible dangers of dropping food on the floor: "You're alone in the kitchen. Whoooooooo's to see?" The line, and the way Streep draws it out, is just one measure of the intimacy of this performance. We're not observers here, but conspirators: We know exactly where the food has been, and we're not telling.

Recipe for success

Sarah Karnasiewicz — Wed, 12 Oct 2005 04:00:00 PDT

In 2002, on the eve of her 30th birthday, depressed and dreading another year as an office drone, Julie Powell decided she needed a hobby. But while knitting or yoga might have appealed to some, Powell's tastes ran to the absurd -- and perhaps the self-destructive. Sitting at her kitchen counter thumbing a well-worn copy of Julia Child's 1961 cookbook classic, "Mastering the Art of French Cooking," Powell had an epiphany. She would cook every one of the 524 recipes in the book. And -- damn it! -- she would do it in one year.