I feel it important to state up front that the kitchen and I do not get along. While we inevitably cross paths from time to time, I try not to make eye contact let alone a meal.  This might explain why Julie & Julia didn’t remotely appease my appetite. The film spends so much time celebrating the art of cooking, it forgets to be dramatic, romantic or funny.

It’s not a drama, as there is hardly a moment of drama to speak of (conflict, what conflict?). It’s not a romance, as everyone in the film is already happily partnered up. It’s not even a comedy, as the funniest scene on offer is merely a replay of Dan Aykroyd’s impersonation of Julia Child in a Saturday Night Live skit.

It is, however, a biography. Two, in fact.

The first concerns struggling writer Julie Powell (Amy Adams), who lives in a dingy apartment above a Pizzeria in Queens, New York. By day, Julie is verbally bashed as a phone operator in a Government office that handles post-9/11 building developments. By night, she cooks up a storm in her tiny kitchen for her loving husband (Chris Messina) while striking up imaginary conversations with her idol, celebrity chef Julia Child. After learning that her snobbish friend blogs vainly about herself to a bevy of readers, Julie believes she too could  start a blog about her cooking. Labelled The Julie/Julia project, she sets out with an ambitious challenge; cook all 524 recipes of Julie Child’s cookbook in just 365 days.

Spliced intermittently between Julie Powell’s blogging babble is Julia Child’s (Meryl Streep) journey of self discovery in 1950’s France.  Easily the better half of the film if not only for the vibrant Paris backdrop, it follows the effervescent gentle giant as she takes up cooking lessons at Le Cord En Bleu culinary school to see if she enjoys making food as much as she does eating it.

That’s about all there is in terms of plot, which takes all of thirty minutes to unfold. The remaining 90 minutes is spent watching the two protagonists prepare dish after dish in what starts to feel like real-time.  Director/screenwriter Nora Ephron (You’ve Got Mail, Bewitched) does a little too well in drawing parallels between the two storylines, as we end up watching the same scene twice; once in the 1950s, and then again in 2002. It raises the question; why bother with both Julie and Julia? Why not just be a movie about one? Perhaps it was an attempt to mask the fact that neither narratives have enough substance to stand independently.

Amy Adams can usually charm her way out of any situation, but under the weight of Ephron’s pen, Julie’s character lacks the fiery spark needed to be the affable “bitch” her blog makes her out to be. Instead, she just whines her way through the film, and then blogs about it. Far zestier is Meryl Streep’s performance as the larger-than-life Julia Child. But if you’re not familiar with the real life Child — which I suspect will be the case with a vast majority of Australians — then Streep will likely come across as an overly caricaturised, helium-drunk eccentric. Whether Streep has nailed Child’s persona is irrelevant; her character drove me up the wall. Kudos to her diplomat husband Paul Child (Stanley Tucci) for putting up with her for all those years. But are we really supposed to believe that the two never fought once? They didn’t according to Ephron’s screenplay, and maybe if she stopped force-feeding us buttered fluff and served up something with actual bite we’d have seen that.

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