Though Brooklyn is Missed, Independence is Gained in Julie & Julia

Cinema loves Brooklyn. In classic films like Dog Day Afternoon, Do the Right Thing, and Saturday Night Fever, Hollywood takes us to the bumper cars at Coney Island, through the Bed-Stuy of the 1980s, and across the Brooklyn Bridge. But in Brooklynite Nora Ephron’s Julie & Julia, our borough is present only through its absence—as the beloved home that one of our protagonists wishes she weren’t leaving. Here, Brooklyn represents comfort and familiarity, rather than the brand new adventure that it does for so many of the young people who are now settling into it.

As Julie Powell, an aspiring writer and call-taker at a city development operation uproots herself and moves from Brooklyn to Queens with her husband, Brooklyn is something to be missed rather than something to be experienced for the first time.

What Julie does experience for the first time is something other than place.

Julie & Julia, as can be deduced from any review or synopsis of the movie, is about cooking. But it is also about love—not only romantic love between two human beings, but also the love of doing something which allows a person to truly engage with the world outside herself. For both Julia Child (Meryl Streep) and Julie Powell (Amy Adams), cooking serves such a function.

In how many romantic comedies and romantic dramas is romance the only real subject matter? Just as our lives are largely built on romantic love, romance, not surprisingly, is the main character in a significant percentage, if not the majority, of classic and contemporary Hollywood films—as well as independent and foreign films.

In When Harry Met Sally, also written by Ephron, do the characters really talk about anything besides relationships? Harry and Sally stroll through Manhattan discussing their sex lives, or their lack of sex, or their ex-significant others. If they have anything else to talk about we certainly don’t see it on film.

In Sleepless in Seattle, another Ephron film, Meg Ryan and Rosie O’Donnell obsess about a man, his relationship with his deceased wife, and the potential for a Meg Ryan-Tom Hanks relationship. There is very little else discussed, with the exception of that one scene in An Affair to Remember which brings tears to the eyes of every female character in the movie.

There is something more fulfilling about Julie & Julia, in that these women find ways to make themselves happy by learning how to do things, not just people.  While both characters have or have had careers at the outset of the film, neither is content with an unsatisfying job and an almost faultlessly sweet husband. In this film, our main characters both begin and end with healthy, happy marriages. The story is largely about their true loves (they’re the butter to each others’ breads, the breaths to each others’ lives), but the real change takes place outside of these ladies’ marriages.

Both find fulfillment independently of their husbands. While Julie Powell’s relationship fumbles temporarily during her year-long intensive French cooking undertaking, it does not fail permanently. Romance and independence prove to be perfectly compatible here.

Watching Ms. Streep is a pleasure, as always, especially as she takes the stage as the strong-willed and charming Julia Child—and especially since her story is set in Paris and Ms. Streep has the opportunity to endear us to her with her clumsy French pronunciation. While her exuberant cooing feels sometimes overdone, the seasoned actress evokes the iconic Julia Child as no other performer of our time could.

Although it’s difficult to understand how she could maintain friendships with vapid multi-million dollar high-rise developers and exploitative journalists, Ms. Adams’s Queens-inhabiting Julie Powers is almost as charming.

What is special about the particular passions our culinary adventurers discover is that despite the independence the activity fosters, cooking is about, if not fully dependent on, relationships. What fun is cooking without someone to cook for?

Such a statement could be made about any art form, but with food, unlike say, photography or writing, the pleasure is derived from the actual reception of the art.  So immediate, and so direct is that recept when you cook for a person, you are there with them, eating with them, drinking with them. Cooking is an art form based entirely on sharing, so when Julie Powell tells her husband that she doesn’t need him, we know that that’s not true, but that’s OK.

Above all else, Julie & Julia embraces the idea that a person, specifically a woman, can be both independent and in love—with something she loves to do and with someone she loves to love.

As far as our borough goes, while Julie Powell loves Brooklyn, she seems able to survive without it. I suppose that’s OK too.