‘Julia’ Review: Haute Cuisine, Honored Chef

[peekaboo]

Julie Cohen and Betsy West cook up a delightful documentary about Julia Child

 

Julia Child finally gets the celebration she deserves in “Julia.” That’s no knock on Meryl Streep’s great-hearted and grandly comic portrayal of her in “Julie & Julia” more than a decade ago. This is a documentary, playing in select theaters. It shows us the woman in full, a fearless, joyous eccentric committed to carrying the oriflamme of French cuisine to the Jell-O-scarfing masses. (A calumny on American cookery of the time, perhaps, but a producer who worked with Julia from the start makes the incendiary claim that no one in greater Boston had an omelet pan when “The French Chef” made its debut to immediate acclaim on WGBH, that city’s educational TV station, in 1963.)

The directors, Julie Cohen and Betsy West (they did the Ruth Bader Ginsburg doc “RBG” three years ago), begin the film with their statuesque star—at 6 foot 3 Julia towered above her cutting boards and stovetops—manhandling, or womanhandling, a particularly plump roasting chicken in the course of seasoning it, trussing it and giving it a deep-tissue butter massage before consigning the bird to the oven. Her devotion to butter was boundless, her sauces were legendarily rich. So is this account of her journey from a life of privilege in Pasadena, Calif., where she was born in 1912, to Smith College, where young women were prepared for what she called “a leisurely butterfly life,” through her work during World War II as a top-secret researcher in the Office of Strategic Services, and then to postwar France, where she discovered her calling, though not yet the media—TV and cookbooks—that would make her improbably famous.

Art Buchwald, the American humorist who also lived in France after the war, once said he went to Paris because he’d heard the streets were paved with mattresses. Julia Child stayed in Paris because the streets were filled with restaurants serving the cuisine that she instantly loved—a chance encounter with a sole meunière did the trick—and that she began to master at the Cordon Bleu cooking school, where she was one of very few women in a world dominated by men.

“Julia” is about many things, the most stirring one—no hint of a pun intended—being an already confident and accomplished woman coming into the fullness of her powers. In the early days of “The French Chef” at WGBH, the station struggled with primitive equipment, editing facilities were limited and teleprompters were unavailable, so the obligatory format was live on tape, with the tape continuing to run regardless of gaffes. Julia wasn’t just unfazed by these constraints, she flourished within them.

Julia Child with a tart

Photo: Jim Scherer/Sony Pictures Classics.

A dauntless performer from the start, she didn’t give a damn about dropping an occasional poulet on the plancher or dripping sweat into her saucepot. Or slicing a substantial piece of flesh off one of her fingers 10 minutes before airtime, which explained the huge bandage she wore throughout the broadcast. (Later, on “Saturday Night Live,” Dan Ackroyd did his deathless impersonation of Julia in extremis, her finger spouting blood like a firehose until she slumped, unconscious, over an uncooked chicken. She cherished the Ackroyd bit, a friend tells us, and showed a tape of it at parties.) 

“Julia” is very much about performance—how the dry-as-dust medium of educational TV was electrified and transformed by its first pop-culture hit, a middle-aged cooking teacher who taught by entertaining, and who entertained by being true to her marvelously odd self. Most of all, though, this terrific documentary is about Julia’s manifold loves—of food; of eating, since the one follows the other; of her husband, Paul Child, the scholarly diplomat she adored to the end of his days; of life. Her phenomenally full life fills the film to the brim.