Julie/Julia

Starring Meryl Streep, Amy Adams, StanleyTucci, Chris Messina.

Written and directed by Nora Ephron.

Produced by Columbia Pictures. 123 minutes.

Meryl Streep is the Venus of Willendorf of actors. The Paleolithic Venus is all bloated boobs and belly, a faceless fertility goddess, Eve as her own eternal garden. With Streep’s Venus, it's her heart and head that are fecund, a primal soul imagining the possible human.

In early films like Sophie’s Choice and Bridges of Madison County, her characters conveyed a sweet, enduring sadness about their lives and the grinding down of all flesh to dust. In recent flicks like The Devil Wears Prada and Doubt, Streep plays embittered characters, sharp-edged, manipulative people, nasty. Her range as an actor is amazing, the more so because she seems to consume the thousand natural shocks the flesh is heir to as a kind of food savored in all its forms. Who could possibly replace her? wondered my film friend Suzy recently. Good question. Dunno. Keira Knightly, perhaps. Kate Winslet? Stay tuned ...

In her latest movie, Julie & Julia, Streep plays Julia Child, the American chef, author and TV personality, who mid-wifed the arrival of French cuisine into mainstream American kitchens. The Julia portion of the film is basically a sweetened up biopic set in 1950’s Paris and New York during McCarthyism's mid-career witch hunts. It tracks Julia Child's evolution from bored matron to the diva of culinary arts.

Streep plays Julia as the physically awkward, slightly masculine woman she was, Terry Jones of Monty Python in drag, Lucy’s loopiness without the art. But there’s another Julia under all fuss and flutter: well-mannered and endearing, as stolid and resolute as Winston Churchill. She’s a truly odd duck and Streep played the role for its inherent comedy while never losing touch with the essential Julia. Not MS's best performance, but it must have been fun for someone so disciplined to let herself go so over-the-top.

In one scene early in the film, we see Julia, running on empty as a diplomat’s wife in Paris, decide to give French cooking a try. Improbably, she ends up in all-male, professional level class at the Cordon Blue. And there she crudely hacks away at onions while male colleagues in chic white chef’s coats slice them in a blur of fearless artistry.

Soon thereafter we see Julia at her kitchen table slicing onions. The pile must have been three feet high. The redolence of the onion mountain is so powerful that when Julia’s husband Paul (Stanley Tucci) comes in the door his hands fly up to his eyes as if he’s been shot, and he flees with just the slightest nod of his head and wave of the white flag of his hand. Julia returns a spousal wave of her own and resumes her quest of proper cutting technique, overriding nature’s call to her tear ducts, the obligation of wifely companionship. Soon, in similar fashion, there will be scientific cooking experiments to conduct and a 700 page cook book to write and sell

The onion scene is played for its inherent comedy, both actors maintaining their formal reserve even when under attack by powerful imagined chemical irritants. It's funny because we've all been there but end up blind with tears; it's notable for the raw power of acting skill not brought into play here. But it also succeeds in letting the audience know that Julia has an inner strength we didn’t see before, true staying power in adversity. Her little wave also says bye-bye to the decision to play a minor role in her own life. Thus begins the story of Julia’s ascent.

But Julia Child isn’t the only main character of this film. There’s also Julie’s story, a second (also true) narrative cleverly entwined with the Julia's. It’s about a young, attractive. thoroughly modern woman, Julie Powell (played by Amy Adams), who fends off a feeling of hopelessness in the post-9.11 world by making a commitment to whip up each and every one of the 500+ recipes in Julia Child's cookbook in 365 days. With unflagging encouragement from her editor husband Eric (Chris Messina), she blogs daily about her project, often quite openly, and wins a bunch of fans. Ultimately, she almost loses her husband in the process of landing a big book contract but it all comes out OK.

Julie’s path to success neatly parallels Julia’s and script writer/director Nora Ephron has fun cutting back and forth between the two stories, showing us how much women have changed in the last half century, and how much they are still the same. Yadda, yadda. It’s done mainly with clothing and the Internet, but also plenty of cute depictions of emotional meltdowns. Quick, wry cuts keep the characters and the audience from slipping beneath the surface of occasionally troubled waters in both eras. I think women may find this stuff funnier than men. Personally, I was amused by seeing Paul and Eric settle warmly into the role of the guy in the ballet troupe who lifts the prima ballerina when needed and otherwise acts as her silent, supportive pivot.

Ephron cast the blog as Julie’s best friend and uses it to serve up still bubbling, often half-baked portions of the wannabe chef’s inner life. I think this narrative device, which Ephron has employed in slightly different forms in Sleepless in Seattle and You'’ve Got Mail, adds a quirky fizz to romantic comedy story lines that might otherwise be too silly or conventional to succeed. This viewer generally likes Ephron because she is a really funny, insightful observer of people, especially when they are in love with someone or something. She certainly knows how to entertain. But I can’t help but wonder what the writer of When Harry Met Sally would have come up with in Julie/Julia if she’d throttled back on the funny girl stuff a little more often.