Julia (2021 | USA | 95 minutes | Betsy West and Julie Cohen)
Julia Child might have been one of the most unlikely TV stars. At 6’3”, she would have been tall enough to play center in the WNBA (the tallest player on the Atlanta Dream in 2021 was 6’4”), she began her TV career at 51 and she wasn’t exactly the most telegenic presence. But she was a TV star and she was the world’s first TV food personality, and she was amazing. She’s also the subject of a great new documentary called Julia.
Child’s life was told through this straight-forward documentary, but what a life it was! 95 minutes hardly seems like enough time to tell her story (if Ken Burns were to create a multi-episode docu-series about her life, I would enjoy that immensely), but there is so much good stuff in Julia that it flies by. I’m not sure there’s anything new that her devoted fans would be unaware of, but I was more than happy to go along with this ride.
I didn’t know that she first worked for what later became the CIA, and reportedly she helped develop shark repellant. The experience was where she also met her husband, Paul Cushing Child. At first, she wasn’t attracted to him (she wrote in letters claiming he wasn’t handsome and had an unfortunate mustache) but she loved the world of fine food and intellectual conversations that he opened to her, and she loved him dearly. Julia was explicit in how much she loved her husband and being a homemaker, and he was equally enthralled with being married to such a strong, famous woman. One of Julia’s surviving friends quipped in this documentary that she believed in “the three ‘F’s:” to feed her husband, to fuck him, and to flatter him.”
I also learned a bit about her exit from PBS and moving from the long-running public TV show The French Chef to being a regular on “Good Morning America.” I’m happy to see all of the details of Child’s life that are described here.
Mrs. Child was known for her cookbook Mastering the Art of French Cooking, which was surprisingly accessible for a book with such a daunting title, and it sold roughly seventy gazillion copies. Publisher Alfred Knopf was shocked by how successful it was, and only green-lit the book after a passionate editor convinced him to give it a chance. And the rest was history.
There were so many details of Child’s life that I felt closer to understanding her. Directors Betsy West and Julie Cohen did a great job of corralling Child’s friends and contemporary admirers (Ina Garten, Ruth Reichl, and Jose Andres are all interviewed. Marcus Samuelsson reminisces of the time she visited his restaurant and seeing it like she went from TV into his humble space). I felt like there was so many aspects of her personality that came through in this movie, how Child became an outspoken LGBT supporter after being casually homophobic, that she was an incorrigible flirt and such a wit, that she was a strong negotiator that wasn’t about to be paid less than where she valued her work and presence, how (and why) she refused to allow brand names to be shown in her TV kitchen, lest brands be able to “buy their way” onto her show.
Cohen and West are known for their documentary RBG, which I didn’t love as much as I did this one, maybe because I’m much more likely to buy into Julia Child’s hagiography than I was for the late Supreme Court justice.
It’s impossible to imagine a world existing where Rachael Ray, Guy Fieri, Bobby Flay, Alton Brown, Anthony Bourdain, Padma Lakshmi, and Molly Yeh are foodie TV stars without the trail Julia Child blazed for them. She’s a true pioneer and such a legend, and Julia makes the legend accessible the same way her famous cookbook made French cooking accessible to so many.
This is the world Julia Child built, and we’re all living in it. And for 95 minutes, we’re even closer to the master of this universe.
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Julia is playing in theaters now.