Adapted from the 2002 memoir by Julie Powell (who apparently really did cook her way through Julia Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking, by the way), the 2009 movie Julie & Julia featuring Meryl Streep as Julia Child and Amy Adams as Julie, is at once funny and sad, visually delicious, and an inspiration to the tired and defeated. With equal amounts of difficulty, setbacks, prodding, and loving support, the tenacious pair of women, living and cooking some fifty years apart, persevere and finish what they set out to do.
This isn’t to say everyone who finishes gets the fans, the fame, the book, and the names like these superstars did, but there is a healthy helping of satisfaction in picking oneself up, dusting oneself off, and picking up the pen again, and there is also a handsome reward in just knowing one has continued to do and especially completed what one has begun. Perhaps the greatest satisfaction to both women characters in this story comes of making a mark and a difference in the world.
I don't recall having loved the movie as much when first I saw it, but now it’s October, which is apple season in Minnesota, and I recently prepared my own dish of boneless pork rib slow cooked in homemade apple sauce--prepared it from start to finish, that is, all the way from having picked the apples from a country tree to preparing skin-on garlic mashed potatoes as accompaniment. I rarely take time to cook from scratch, as they call it, as I am usually preoccupied. The cooking attracted me to rewatching this movie.
In keeping with the theme of blogging, which plays out in the movie, as well, I will comment I also have been away from my own blogs for weeks, even months. I sometimes think they will go utterly fallow. Then suddenly I find I am wondering how to turn these sharply categorized blogs on movies, books, research-based writing, travel, and plain old musing, into one blog. I now feel inclined to try writing about it all in one blog for as surely as the experiences and my thoughts about them get tangled up in my days, I can place them measure for measure together in the bloggy cooking pot.
I feel so warm tonight after seeing this delightful movie again. I feel as if I’ve spent a few hours with imaginary friends I admire and their imaginary friends they admire, from whom I too draw inspiration. The friends may be imagined but the feeling is real. 