I will sum up my impressions of this movie thusly: Food part was OK, but the so-called “Feminist” influence (apart from, being woman-centric) was close to Zero (=Nada) score-points in my opinion. The (post)modern-day Julie Powell was (as others have hinted) a big let-down as any type of assertive female/heroine one could root for…she came across as a general, archetypal wimp for me! Meryl Streep’s full-blooded characterization of Julia Childs on the other hand was superb in its feistiness (they don´t make them like that anymore), but
whatever has happened to that archetype on the big screen nowadays (in contemporary movies)? It seems that the homemakers of the fifties were made of greater stuff than the contemporary, “liberated” woman as symbolically portrayed and perceived in this movie, which makes me speculate on the reason why Hollow-wood/Hollywood let this movie “slip by” in their otherwise quite patriarchally-minded stuff…well, it seems like they wanted to sell the idea (down our throats) that contemporary American women should go back to being cooks and glorified homemakers (with a token career).

Thanks for letting me have my say…nice blog, by the way!

The other point in the movie when Julia and her husband appeared to mourn over the child they couldn’t have was towards the beginning of the movie when they had just arrived in Paris. They were in a park – I think near the Eiffel Tower – there was a smal,white and fluffy dog and some children. Julia appeared to catch her breath, Paul patted her arm and they both seemed to communicate wordlessly that they knew what the other was feeling but they were coninuing on living not dwelling on what couldn’t be – at least that is how I read the scene.

I’ve been a slavish fan of Meryl Streep since I first saw her in the TV mini-series “Holocaust” and in a tiny part in the movie “Julia” (her first role! How’s that for serendipity?) years ago. She NEVER disappoints!

Secondly, the reason flame Le Creuset is so ubiquitous is that it was the ONLY color available for many, many years (rather like the Model T: any color you want as long as it’s black) until the company finally branched out into turquoise and a soft butter yellow (that I foolishly did NOT buy when seen, dirt cheap, at a flea market 20 years ago, alas) in the late 1950′s. It’s their signature color.

Finally, my husband was particularly appalled at the disgusting table manners of the Julie husband character, being rightly offended that the young fellow apparently had NOT paid attention when his mother (or, in my case, my very polite and well-mannered father) instructed him never, ever to talk with his mouth full. Bleah.

Yep, on a Paris street not very long after they arrived.

I just didn’t get what it was about Julie Powell’s story that was worth the attention it got beyond the confines of her blog. It wasn’t interesting to me, the relationship seemed shallow and not particularly respectful, she didn’t seem all that connected to the food she was cooking, and I got really, really annoyed with how the husband shoveled food into his mouth like he’d been locked up in a P.O.W. camp for years on end. Really? That’s how you show appreciation for food? Ram large quantities into your mouth and chew with your mouth open? They both just came across as incredibly crass, and even more so when contrasted with the Childs.

But, of course, Meryl Streep and Stanley Tucci were to die for.

When she blogs about it, I think it’s not because she admits her inadequacy as a wife, but because she has been selfish as a partner. Her post shows that she understands his complaint, which is that he feels left out and neglected. I really didn’t see anything particularly gendered in it. In fact, one of the things I particularly liked is that they seemed to have a partnership.

I agree that, at the time, Julia did have to downplay her role in the OSS, and am interested in the idea that she wanted to be a career woman per se. My impression of her, based on reading a lot of profiles over the years, as well as excerpts from her book, is that she just didn’t want to be bored! I never got the feeling there was an active feminist agenda, but rather that she was the kind of person who would always have looked for something to do, and was married to the sort of person who thought she pretty much could do whatever she set her mind to.

And I guess I actually don’t think it was clear from the beginning that she was a career woman who put that before having a family – I mean, she worked in the OSS, of course, but that was before meeting Paul. I actually thought that it came across that after marrying Paul she followed him to France and, like many of the other housewives, found herself at a loss about what to do. I kinda saw the movie as describing the birth of the career woman, not as presenting her as actually being one already when it started. (Which is actually one of the things I love about Julia – MtAoFC was finally published when she was 49, and her public career began at that point and continued almost until her death. She’s like the anti-starlet.)

I guess I would need to know whether her sadness about not having kids was accurate or not. If that was something she wrote about in her book, then the movie did a decent job with it. I just worry it got added in, which would bug me.

I kind of feel like the Julie-as-self-absorbed thing never quite got resolved – like b(oston)s(cholar) said, her husband gets all upset and storms off, and comes back when she confesses her self-absorption, but I really didn’t see anything change. She was still cooking. Did she change? Did he learn to live with it? Who really gave in there? It was a little unsatisfying.