Simultaneously adapting Julia Child’s autobiography My Life In France and Julie Powell’s blog-turned-memoir Julie & Julia, Nora Ephron’s Julie & Julia is two movies in one. That’s one more movie than it needs to be. One portrays Child’s self-discovery through cooking. The other focuses on Powell’s attempt to spend a year preparing all the recipes in Child’s co-authored 1961 breakthrough Mastering The Art Of French Cooking, a cookbook that made classic French dishes accessible to “the servantless American cook.” The first is a charming story of a woman finding a calling in a time and place when women weren’t generally thought to need callings. The second is an accidental dissection of Internet-enabled 21st-century narcissism rendered in broad strokes and easy punchlines.
