In 2002, a frustrated wannabe-writer named Julie Powell, who worked as a secretary for the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation, decided to cook her way through the 500+ recipes of American celebrity chef Julia Child's Mastering the Art of French Cooking in one year and write a blog chronicling her efforts. This film is the result of that blog, but writer/director Nora Ephron decided one story wasn't enough and also adapted Child's posthumous autobiography My Life in France, and tells the story of how that seminal book came into existance.

This is ostensibly a comedy but it's not very amusing and the double-whammy is that it's so lightweight it doesn't really work as a drama either. The story of Child going from bored wife to trained chef and writer, coupled with Powell's tale of a year of blogging doesn't really create any really genuinely funny moments or situations where we truly care about what's happening to these people. At one point Powell's husband leaves her but it's so tritely drawn it falls somewhat flat, and knowing that Child will succeed in getting her book published relies on individual scenes to provide interest.

Amy Adams

Amy Adams and Meryl Streep take the respective roles of Julie and Julia, and just as they did together in Doubt, they highlight the opposite approaches the actresses take. Adams gives a very natural, subtle turn but isn't really given much to do. Streep on the other hand has this extremely big personality ... and even a few watches of clips on youtube will show that her 2D caricature of Child owes more to Dan Aykroyd's Saturday Night Live skit than the real thing. It has been suggested that Streep is playing people's idea of Child rather than Child herself, but when the result is a supposedly beloved character so annoying that she should be taken round the back of the nearest shed and given both barrels to the face, it doesn't work on its own merits. Given her reputation for accents it's doubly distressing that she's taken this woman and made her sound like a pompous soprano who's just sat on a red hot poker. Now, this overplaying of the sing-song nature of the personality is something Greer Garson did to Eleanor Roosevelt in Sunrise at Campobello, but Streep here makes it difficult to get involved with her character because she's so over the top.

The cutting between the timelines is not very consistent and sometimes it stretches too far to draw parallels between the two stories, yet in spite of all of this it does just about work. A nice score by Alexandre Desplat holds the two together and while not really working properly as a drama or a comedy, half-hitting both makes it watchable in general, if not entirely successful. Adams is the best thing about the modern story (her on-screen husband Chris Messina is sufficiently dull) and Stanley Tucci as Child's husband gives a very nice little performance to balance out Streep's excesses. Both storylines have their moments (Child finding out her sister is pregnant, Powell and the lobsters), but they're few and far between and the end result is a film that only just about drags itself up to average.