"Julia" Is A Delicious Treat

Hi team,

I am going to do my best to write two very quick entries before the end of the month.

So here we go:

Let's talk about the most recent movie about famous chef and cookbook author, Julia Child: "Julia" (2021).

Despite its relatively short run time, this film was a rich, dense biography of the life and career of a beloved food icon.  It provided insights into Child's childhood and early adulthood, the important relationships that shaped her, and how her earliest experiences in France forever captured her heart and ultimately changed the history of American cooking forever.

While the movie is deeply affectionate toward the woman at its center, it does not shy away from some of the more complicated and at times ugly chapters in her life.  For example, it explores the at times strained and contentious relationship between Child and her co-author, French chef Simone Beck.  It also acknowledges Child's history of overt homophobia, although it also allows her some degree of redemption by highlighting her remarkable about-face after her lawyer and dear friend Bob Johnson, who was gay, died during the AIDS epidemic; she later went on to become an early celebrity voice advocating for awareness, research, and treatment for AIDS.  

Unsurprisingly, one of the most prominent themes throughout the movie is Child's immense impact on the average American home cook.  So much of her life's mission was to reclaim nourishing and delicious cooking for all of humanity--to take "fancy" cooking out of the kitchens of exclusive and elitist restaurants and make it accessible and accomplishable in every home's kitchen.  Hers was a deeply admirable and humanitarian aim to reconnect people with their enjoyment of creating food they can love and be proud of.  It is a wonderful gift to her fellow human beings and an enviable legacy.

With that in mind, I found it particularly rankling with Ruth Reichl, chef and food writer, discussed with some pride how Child eventually lost influence and how the next generation of chefs--presumably Reichl's cohort of food professionals--"elevated" cooking again by emphasizing niche and artisanal ingredients not available to the average family.  It doesn't seem to occur to Reichl that the impact of her generation of chefs is actually to push excellence in cooking backward, again to a point that it is so "fancy", exclusive, and expensive as to be unattainable or intimidating to the average home cook.  It's a strange thing to congratulate oneself and one's colleagues for, especially in the context of this particular film celebrating the inclusivity and general empowerment of Child's cooking legacy.

At its conclusion, this movie is heartwarming and uplifting without being overly saccharine--a true honor to its subject.  I gave it a 5.

{Heart}