Julie and Julia is a sweet, breezy way to pass a humid or rainy summer afternoon with two virtues which lift it above other pleasant but somewhat forgettable summertime fare. First, this is a movie which should not stay with you, because Nora Ephron makes you relate to Julia Child and Julie Powell as two people who want self-fulfillment and find it after an assortment of setbacks and missteps, but she never makes the importance of these struggles clear…the stakes never feel raised enough, and the writing and production are not so remarkable to keep the film lodged in your mind. I understand Julie Powell, but I never get emotionally invested in her. However, the movie DOES stand out because of Meryl Streep, who has probably ratcheted up Oscar nomination number…I've lost count now…as Julia Child. I FORGOT I was watching Meryl Streep. She has studied Julia's voice, mannerisms, and irrepressible good humor and made them her own. And, great actress that she is, she gives an otherwise fluffy movie emotional weight by grasping Julia's psychology. Julia breaks down once over the course of the picture, and the way Streep handles it made me want to cry, as well. Amy Adams is a fine actress, but Streep never allows her to give a performance of equitable weight. I have to agree with A. O. Scott, that we should just find a way to get Meryl Streep and Stanley Tucci (a dry performance as Paul Child) in every movie and the world will be perfect. Second, watching Meryl Streep chop onions and Amy Adams poach eggs and work wonders with beef, duck, lobsters, and soufflés makes you want to cook things you've never cooked before and fills you with new appreciation of food. And Ephron equates food and love, physical and emotional, in a fun way…just listen to Streep deliver the line about cannelloni.
John Hughes died on Thursday at 59…I was never a devotee the way some people are, but like Michael Jackson, I grew up with him. Seeing the two Home Alones with Macaulay Culkin gave me a plethora of childhood laughs, to this day there are few works of cinema more effortlessly enjoyable than Ferris Bueller's Day Off, and every holiday season in the Rostan house involves AT LEAST one viewing of National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation. Hughes's success came from combining a strong commercial sensibility with a real point of view: a love for the ingenuity of youth and, paradoxically, the family values which make the comically not-as-on-the-ball adults and their offspring ultimately bond together. The adults in his work were never as sharply written as the knowing, longing teenagers of The Breakfast Club. They're often doltish and blundering. His sympathies were with the under-eighteen, the purity and simplicity of their desires and striving for certainty before the minutiae of the "real world" get in the way. When we're young, we truly believe that if we can get a grasp on love, friendship, and moral values, the rest will take care of itself. John Hughes understood this. He also understood how easy "the real world" can subsume and bring in shades of gray we never anticipated, and he was forgiving because in his view, adults are still teenagers within who want that simplicity back. It is no coincidence that Hughes's favorite "grown-up" leading actor was that man-child supreme, John Candy. He may not have worked much or produced valuable output for the last decade, but he will be missed, now and forever, for those other masterpieces. (And I now would love to read his unproduced screenplay with P. J. O'Rourke, The History of Ohio from the Beginning of Time to the End of the Universe. Anyone know where I can get a copy?)
There were other deaths. Budd Schulberg, the name-naming writer of the extraordinary On the Waterfront, finally passed away, severing one of our strongest links to old-school Hollywood. Willy DeVille, the punk rock icon who got and Oscar nomination for "Storybook Love" from The Princess Bride, went to the fairy-tale kingdom in the sky. And most tragically for my circle of friends, Blake Snyder's third act ended at only 51. Save the Cat! allowed me to write An Elegy for Amelia Johnson and other screenplays, and has been a source of inspiration to everyone I know in the business. Name me one person who understood the real driving forces behind the screenplay better than Blake Snyder (Robert McKee, brilliant as he is, gets too wrapped up in aesthetic theory) and I'll argue with you for twenty-four hours. And I have a horrible suspicion he might have had more to teach us. Los Angeles will be all the poorer without him.
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