Julie and Julia: A Friendship Made in Hollywood

** Spoiler Alert: This post is bet­ter read after you’ve watched the movie, prefer­ably right after. **

Yes­ter­day I watched the movie Julie and Julia. (It’s Christ­mas hol­i­days, don’t judge.) And it was rec­om­mended by my friend the diplo­mat, so I was watch­ing it for Queen and coun­try. For the most part it is a charm­ing film about kin­dred spir­its –two women born in dif­fer­ent ages, bound by a com­mon love of cook­ing. A beau­ti­ful friend­ship that time could not thwart. The story unfor­tu­nately goes off the rails with the strange real­iza­tion that the friend­ship is one-sided at best. Julia Child does not approve. It becomes more than a lit­tle confusing.

The movie strug­gles to rec­on­cile this very minor detail. Nora Ephron, the Direc­tor, prob­a­bly does as well as any­one could do with such a shaky premise. We can’t help but won­der, “How can such a great woman snub her nose at her biggest fan?”

Julia Child is depicted through the whole movie as a sweet, inspi­ra­tional woman. Julie spends a year fol­low­ing her foot­steps, as best she can. Then sud­denly the men­tor is described as being “a bit of a pill” about the whole thing.  What a cow!

Who’s side should we take?

Juila’s story ends there. Here is her side: Rather than being hard and uncom­pro­mis­ing in her later years, Julia sim­ply felt that:

• Julie was doing her year-long project more or less as a stunt, rather than as a seri­ous attempt to get her life in order. Her real posts cer­tainly do tell a dif­fer­ent story than the movie ones do.
• Julie didn’t actu­ally appre­ci­ate the cook­ing, or the recipes. In one of her posts, Julie writes about get­ting drunk, get­ting a bikini wax and then refects on her recipe-of-the-evening that, http://blogs.salon.com/0001399/2003/04/30.html, “I was sup­posed to degrease the sauce, but f*** it.” It shouldn’t be sur­pris­ing that a woman of 88 years didn’t approve.

Juila’s pub­lisher and close friend at Alfred A. Knopf com­mented that Julia “didn’t suf­fer fools, if you know what I mean” (Source).

Julia Child had spent 8 years writ­ing an incred­i­ble, ground-breaking cook­book and then spent the rest of her life teach­ing us how to cook and enjoy food. And then she ended up tak­ing sec­ond billing in a movie about her own life. That’s got to burn.

She worked hard to share her pas­sion and help peo­ple. Just like it’s so hard to remem­ber a good book after we’ve seen the movie, let’s not for­get the real Julia Child.