Julie and Julia has all of the winning ingredients of your lady-happy chick-flick, mixed with some run-of-the-mill award baiting biographical gubbins and sprinkled with a couple of ?it? leads – but this recipe is overcooked.
It's hard to find a more likeable lady in Hollywood than Amy Adams, with the innocent twinkle in her eye and an irresistible charm to her performances, she is perfectly capable here of portraying one half of this twin-bio as Julie Powell. The other half comes from Meryl Streep, in another performance for her to literally chew on in the hope it’ll shit out a few more awards. Here she jumps into some big shoes to play the hormonally challenged Julia Child.
It is really Streep?s show ? as you would expect ? managing to make a decent embodiment of Child and her eccentricities, including the voice that sounds like a drowning goat. It's a thorough performance and slaps a bit of smugness on Streep’s part (she must have had some space in her awards cupboard to fill).
As Julie starts blogging her way through Child?s Mastering the Art of French Cooking, we get flashbacks to Child becoming the legendary master chef that she was known as. It's a tale of two women who struggle through culinary woes and the only missing piece from the biopic checklist is the usual drug addiction act – but the only cold turkeys are the ones in her fridge.
The film never really exceeds its expectations but manages to be an enjoyable romp. It doesn't even act as gratuitous food porn (you’ll have to look elsewhere for that), as all the culinary delights on offer won't urge you to be prepping lobster thermidor any time soon.
As the plot trickles on we just see the two characters’ meteoric rise to success, with few struggles on the way. Only Julie comes across an obstacle in the form of the most pathetic break-up argument ever to have been committed to the silver screen (we've shouted at children in the street with more ferocity). In fact, Julie?s boyfriend Eric (Chris Messina) is a wet blanket, given nothing to do but stuff his ridiculously sculpted face and then hit on Adams – how could we possibly like a character who gets paid to do that?
The film seems to build-up to a meeting between the two leads that never happens, and the happy ending is loosely pinned together in the cheesiest way possible. Julie and Julia themselves are a couple of sweet characters with a nice bit of decorative icing on top, but after indulging on them for too long we felt the urge to be sick.
?Spray Rating: 3/5
Follow hecklerspray on Twitter