Weary of her stop-gap cubicle job, Amy Adams’ Julie Powell embarks on a year-long quest to cook her way through Mastering the Art of French Cooking (and blog her progress). Newlywed in Paris and recently sprung from American government service, Meryl Streep’s Julia Child takes cooking classes at Le Cordon Bleu and begins a cookbook project that eventually becomes Powell’s culinary torchlight. Despite what you may have heard, the Powell segments are not a total disservice and Adams goes a long way to ease Powell’s grating self-absorption. While Child’s journey is more groundbreaking and Herculean, both stories portray the same theme: The pleasures and pains of a project of passion are the most transformative, not the end result.
This article appears in Aug 13-19, 2009.