What with the ever-growing public fascination with all things culinary, it was only a matter of time before a movie about cooking was brought out of the storecupboard – but it’s impossible to be cynical about a movie as light and breezy as Julie & Julia. Suckers for gastronomic erotica, there’s plenty of that to tuck into here – you can practically taste that bruschetta – but Julie & Julia is not a mere celebration of food, but a pleasant pair of true stories about the hand that rocks the ladle.

Julia Child (channelled by Meryl Streep) is a tall, warbly-voiced woman who lives in Paris with her American serviceman husband Paul (Stanley Tucci) in the early 1950s. Initially just looking for something to do, she becomes the first American woman to enroll in Paris’s Cordon Bleu cooking school, where it’s apparent that what she lacks in natural ability in cooking she makes up for in her unrelenting enthusiasm.

Julia’s story is intercut with the close-enough-to-present day story of modern woman Julie Powell (Amy Adams). Julie lives with her husband Eric (Chris Messina) above a pizza parlour in Queens, where she despairs of her crummy job, her vapid friends and of never having finished anything. In Julie’s time, Julia Child has already changed the face of cooking in America with her tome Mastering the Art of French Cooking. Julie hatches a plan to cook all 524 recipes in the book in a single year and to blog her progress.

The movie does have the slight problem of acquired local tastes. You get the distinct impression that the whole of America knows and loves Julia Child from her TV stint as The French Chef, but she verges on larger-than-life for the uninitiated, and I’m not talking about Streep’s platform heels. (Labouring the point of her stature in American culture, we see a clip of Dan Aykroyd impersonating Child in a Saturday Night Live skit. The sequence goes on for way too long – as do most Saturday Night Live skits.)

In spite of that, Streep’s dynamic with Tucci is thoroughly believable – Julia and Paul’s childless but happy marriage is a joy to watch, and Jane Lynch is her usual scene-stealing self as Julia’s even taller sister. Amy Adams, representing this side of 2000, also holds her own.

Writer-director-producer Nora Ephron (Sleepless in Seattle, You’ve Got Mail) has done a superb job, both in writing and directing, of mirroring the parallel stories of these women, their ambitions, and the support of their husbands. Julie and Julia are meant for each other. Ephron shows their connection across time with the same sort of poetic touches that we saw in Sam and Annie in Sleepless in Seattle.

Only there’s no climactic meeting on top of the Empire State Building this time. The movie hints at an intersection of Julie and Julia’s stories, dangles it there for a bit, then abruptly snatches it away. It’s true to the real-life events, but it’s a bit of a nuisance plot-wise.

At 123 minutes, Julie & Julia does not offer up anything resembling high-stakes drama, which will be tiresome for some. On the other hand, it’s rather nice to see a new recipe coming out of Hollywood, handled deftly by one of its master chefs. After some missteps in recent years, it’s a happy return to the kitchen for Ephron.

Julie and Julia opens in cinemas on Thursday, October 8, 2009.
You can watch the Julie and Julia movie trailer here on TheVine.