Julie Powell’s tale of deciding to make every single one of the recipes in Mastering the Art of French Cooking and doing it in one year and Julia Child’s memoir of her life in France with her husband, Paul, as she learned to cook, plus other elements of her life.
As Julie (Amy Adams), cute and smart and wanting to be writer, works her way through the recipes, we get to meet her superficial and more successful Manhattan friends, her loving husband who eventually gets tired of the project and his wife’s self obsession with it, and the gradual recognition of others, including some in the writing game, of what she’s doing.
She keeps a blog and seems as devoted to it as she is to Julia Child. Back and forth we go in flashback as we also see Julia Child (Meryl Streep) trying to find something to do in Paris where her husband has been assigned after the war, deciding to master great French cooking, and discovering that great cooking and eating well prepared food is what she enjoys the best.
To the surprise of some, but not herself or her husband, she becomes a wonderful example of try, try again, hard work, indomitable perseverance and good humor… all voiced with her inherent cheerfulness!
There’s a lot more to this film than cooking. In fact it’s not really a film about cooking but about two women in different times who set out to do something and become totally absorbed, to the point that it takeovers their lives.