The biggest surprise in the delightful Julie & Julia isn't Meryl Streep's quirky portrayal of Julia Child -- I mean, she's Meryl Streep, after all, you expect her to be excellent -- but that the movie was written and directed by Nora Ephron, most famous for the super-chicky gal flicks When Harry Met Sally, Sleepless in Seattle and You've Got Mail. But her last two efforts, Hanging Up and Bewitched, were among the worst of her career (and this is the woman who perpetrated Mixed Nuts, one of the most dreadful attempts at comedy of the 1990s), so it was safe to assume that Ephron couldn't make magic again.
And yet, Julie & Julia is such a sweet pleasure that if Ephron's name weren't in the credits, you might not know she directed it. Sure, the Ephron chick-flick signposts are all there. The story involves a fair amount of typing, voiceovers-while-writing and screenshots of computer screens. The main character has a funny, less-pretty best friend. Much of the film is punctuated by painfully sappy, on-the-nose pop songs. Julie's quest to cook every recipe in Julia Child's Mastering the Art of French Cooking in one year is paralleled by Child's own adventures learning to cook in Paris in the 1950s, so there's a lot of passionate cooking and eating, as in Ephron's autobiographical 1986 comedy, Heartburn (which also starred Streep).
But despite having her hands all over it, Julie & Julia is simply sublime. Based on both the true story of Powell's journey from dissatisfied cubicle dweller to published author via her online "Julie/Julia Project" and Child's years leading up to the publication of her famous Mastering the Art of French Cooking, the film cuts between the two (sort of like in Sleepless in Seattle, when you think about it) and illuminates the ways in which their lives are rather similar.
It's not a big, flashy movie, nor is it one that will end up on a lot of Top 10 lists at the end of the year. But Streep's portrayal of Child is fun, Adams brings just the right amount of spunk, the food looks delicious, and the characters' relationships are surprisingly stable and well-wrought. If there were more chick flicks like this one, the genre wouldn't have such a bad reputation.