Saw "Julie & Julia" yesterday and cracked completely over Meryl Streep's performance.
The movie combines two real characters who are connected through a similar passion: cooking! Julie Powell, a young woman feeling that her life is going nowhere, with her 30th anniversary coming up and nothing representative on her record and chooses to assign for a special project: cooking her way through all the reciepes of Julia Child's cookbook, "Mastering the Art of French Cooking." More than 500 recipes in one year - and writing a blog about it: "The Julie/Julia Project".
In real life this blog "developed enough of a following to earn her a book deal and, as the end titles note with characteristic cuteness, inspired the movie. Probably aware that Powell's story alone wouldn't sustain an entire feature, Ephron opted to divide the film's 122-minute running time between Julie and Julia, also drawing material from the latter's posthumously completed 2006 memoir, "My Life in France." (Variety) .
The film sets parallels between the lifes of Julie and Julia not only in their passion for cooking, their struggle for attention, recognition and getting their work published and the uncondioned love and support by their husbands.
"so the film implies a kinship between two women who never meet, united across time and space by their love of butter, their doting husbands, their search for meaning through pleasure and their struggles to see their work in print. (Call it "Publisher-less in Paris.")" (Variety)
Anyhoo, Meryl Streep IS BRILLIANT!! She delivers a performance that is so outstanding and in some ways reminds of Johnny Depp's Captain Jack Sparrow ("Savvy?!"): her prononciation and moves indicates that she is either drunk or seasick.
You can see why she is THE actor's actor of her generation: not only does she very correctly portray Julia Child in sound, appearance and moves - but she does it not as a identical copy. Director/writer Nora Ephron says that Streep delivers a characterization rather than an impersonation. And that really describes it:
It is like when one is telling a story or anecdote to a round of friends in a bar. Something funny from vacation, a terrible work day, a tragic incident that happened to a friend: it is not so much the facts (that would be a protocol) but the arrangement, structure and presentation that turns an incident into a story. When one hears about something, or something happens to you - and you find it funny, tragic, ironic, sad, outragous - whatever: to convey this impression one must dramatize the incident.
>> INTERLUDE: Which makes clear why the skill of story telling and performative skills are crucial anywhere in life where communication takes place: in relationships, professional life. Storytelling, summing up to a plot, finding the core of a story, structure an order of narrative elements to achieve certain effects in an audience is necessary to convince an employer to hire you, making a date to calling you again, to plan a successful event - even to create a coherent self: assembling fractured data of a series of events in a meaningful , your autobiography, the story you tell someone, when he or she asks you who you are. You need to know what the storyline is and need to be able to tell it. INTERLUDE END <<
And with Meryl Streeps performance, it's the same thing: to make something clear about what Nora Ephron and Meryl Streep find interesting about Julia Child as a character, her way of approaching challenges, cooking and her marriage, her joyful attitude, never afraid of embarassment, never intimidated it is not necessary nor helpful to deliver a 1:1 copy (in that case we could look at the original TV shows), but to create a certain dramatic arrangement of the available information material and a special performative approach be Mrs. Streep.
So Streep's performance is perfect crafts(wo)manship of acting in the sense that it is an empathetic creation and repesentation of an idea of an individual way of approaching life, connect to the world, facing challenges, relate to other people, love another person; an idea that is based on that real person, Julia Child, her concrete life and thus contains an authentic portrayal of her
but that does not wear out in that mimic authenticity or an inventory narration of that concrete life.
And that's what describes the art of acting: not just reading words from a piece of paper, but understanding the core of a story and its characters and from that idea develop a figurative concept to make the idea, the "message" visible; to build a set of expressive methods - gestures, looks, mimic expressions, pitch of the voice, dialect, interacting with objects, other actors -
and assemble all these single ingredients to a coherent composition in balance and with reference towards the other actors, the set, the ideas of the director etc.
Meryl Streeps and Stanley Tucci's portrayal of her unpretencious, cheerful personality and his unconditioned admirance and support for her create a colourful image of an unusual, passionate relationship that is just touching without being being cheesy.
