Half Endearing, Half Forgettable: Some Thoughts On Julie & Julia

(Image above taken/edited from TheMovieDB.org)

There's a quality to parts of this film (those parts being the Julia Child/Meryl Streep scenes) that I find so wonderfully endearing. It's a kind of romanticism that makes you want to inhabit this same France that the fictionalized characters are so in love with, with its sumptuous colours, streaming lights and blissful abandon. Accepting the fact that the film has taken creative liberties in upholding this ceaseless charm doesn't detract from these moments at all. What does detract though are the scenes with Julia's counterpart, Julie, and her husband struggling in a smokey, drab modern Manhattan, who's story follows a fairly predictable arc where they bond over food, Julie becomes self-absorbed, they break up, get back together in five to ten minutes, yada yada yada. True, their relationship was completely believable for me and had a sweetness of its own, but I felt their story in many ways still fell flat. And it'd be a neat juxtaposition of circumstances if the film didn't have to constantly draw attention to the differences and similarities between its titular protagonists. It's apparently not enough to let the visuals tell the story - we have to have Julie writing in her blog about how her and Julia's lives were so similar, that they were both government agents and that they both found joy in cooking. It's disappointingly unsubtle, much like how the presentation of the story is also unsubtle and bland. Most scene compositions in the film follow the same format: shot-reverse shot using medium close-ups. There's a few exceptions, sure, but not anything to lose sleep over or to write about in excessive detail on some blog. 

In short, Julie & Julia can be abundantly charismatic in its portrayal of an embellished France alongside a bubbly and exuberant character richly realised by Streep, but it can be pretty forgettable in its film-making and in aspects of its predictable narrative. So, a seven out of ten? Maybe a six. Well, it's somewhere around there anyway.