The Meddler #6: ...And My Fixes For Julie and Julia

As I explained yesterday, Julie’s choice to merely cook all these recipes is never going to be as interesting as the parallel story, in which an actual chef invents and publishes those recipes against real opposition. BUT, the ingredients (pardon me) of a real conflict are still there in Julie’s scenes, waiting to come out.

First, we have to ask ourselves, since Adams experiences no real opposition to her cooking, can we get a story out of opposition to her blogging? Consider the cartoon above. I didn’t have go digging for it: I ran across it in this week’s “New Yorker” while I was writing this very entry. The point is, in this snooty city, blogging is still a very disreputable thing to do! Even in 2011! In 2002, it was considered, by the literati, to be downright pathetic!

In the movie, it is briefly mentioned that Julie’s husband is himself a book editor—these are the gatekeepers with the least respect for self-publishing of any kind. Her friends are print-journalists. It is also briefly mentioned that she told everybody for years that she was writing a novel, but abandoned it. These potential sources of conflict are mentioned, but then dropped, because the movie would rather complain about how whiny all those 9/11 victims were to Julie! Surely there’s something that can be done with this...

…But wait, what about the bizarre ending with the unexplained diss from Julia Child herself? Well, I’ll be honest, my first instinct was just to cut that depressing plot detail out. It’s not like the biopic police are going to arrest you for excising damning information. But, in the spirit of this project, let’s say we have to leave it in—Well, I say it can be done. But if we’re going to leave it in, it can’t just be casually mentioned and then blithely dismissed. And we don’t have to, because in this version: it becomes the whole point of the movie! Watch where I’m going with this…

1. Before we meet Julia, we meet Julie: She moves to a Queens apartment that she hates. She finds her job helping 9/11 victims fulfilling but depressing. At first she says her new kitchen is too small to cook anything fancy in, but her disappointed husband reminds her how much she used to love to cook Julia Child recipes. She says she can’t do that anymore because she doesn’t have Julia Child’s advantages. Her husband is dubious about that. Julie admits that she doesn't actually know anything about Julia’s life, but still...
   
2. So the next day, while at Barnes and Noble she starts reading the beginning of Julia Child’s autobiography in a comfy chair…
3. Now we see Julia’s dislocated early years in Paris, where she struggled mightily to find herself and earn the right to be a chef...
4. Julie is too poor to buy the book, but she comes home, takes out Julia’s cookbook and makes something fancy which makes her very happy. She decides to do it every day.
5. She brags to her friends about her new happiness technique but they are appalled. She’s hiding form the world in the kitchen? In the most exciting city in the world? Did their mothers fight for nothing? Why can’t Julie stand up for herself and make her husband do the cooking? She realizes that they’ll never understand how happy this makes her...
   
6. But she’s dying to tell someone about her adventures in cooking, so she secretly starts a blog, hoping to find an online community, but at first she gets no comments…
7. She goes to an editor party at her husband’s publishing firm, and meekly asks them what they think of blogging. They all tear into the idea viciously: it devalues what editors do and takes money out of real writers’ pockets by giving away unedited pablum for free. Someone needs to tell these people that nobody wants to hear their crap. Julia slips out in horror. Her husband runs out after her...
8. Her husband tries to cheer her up by buying her the biography she started in the bookstore. She reads further…
   
9. We see Child’s snooty treatment at the Cordon Bleu and by Paris society…
10. …but we return to Julie as she abruptly closes the book. The book is too good! She’ll read it all week and not get any cooking done. She decides that she can only finish it when she’s done with the project, which she dives back into enthusiastically…
11. Gradually, she builds an online community and fans, which makes her happy, but her husbands eventually admits that he misses hanging out with their old editor friends who they’ve shunned since the party. She says she can’t bear to face them again. He says that maybe they were right—she is withdrawing from the world. He leaves to go to an editor party alone.
    
12. At home alone and depressed again, she decides to break her rule and crack open the book again, just for a few chapters…
13. We see Julia’s social flowering through cooking, her Valentine’s day party, getting her sister married, etc…
14. Julie and her husband cautiously decide to invite her “get out of the kitchen” friends and his editor friends to an in-their-face Julia Child themed dinner party. They show up ready for a fight, but she wins them all over with great food and good humor.
    
    Until… the end of dinner, when she says that, when the projects all over, she might want to publish it as a book—who knows? One of the editors visibly blanches at this, but forces a polite smile. Julie insists on hearing what her honest reaction was. The editor politely refuses. Julie insists again, saying she really wants to know. Finally, the editor erupts: “If I hear one more blogger come into my office telling me about how we should publish their blog entries, I will explode! I want to say to them: I know you have ‘fans’! You have ‘fans’ because it’s FREE!” Mortified, Julie meekly thanks her for her honesty, and they all struggle through the rest of dinner.
15. Now feeling truly isolated, Julie bitterly limits herself to the online community that loves her, worrying her husband even more. He suggests that if this was really all about getting published, she should drop the project and restart her novel. She is tempted, but she says she has to finish, if only so she can finish reading the biography. He asks if it’s really that good and starts reading it himself... After he reads the next section, he insists that she read it too to cheer herself up… She does…
16. We get the whole story about Julia’s epic struggle to publish her book and all the many disappointments she faced.
17. Later, Julie comes home one day and her husband has a surprise for her: he found the complete tapes of Julia’s cooking show—he’s a big fan of Julia now too. They watch them together. Now they see the clip of Julia dropping her quiche on the counter and picking it back up, laughing and saying “It can still be fixed—who’s to know? And if it isn’t perfect, always remember: Never apologize! No excuses! No explanations necessary!” Julie practices saying this out loud. Her husband encourages her. They both shout it out the window…
    
18. Julia enters the last stretch of the project with her new motto, “Never apologize!” When editors at parties make fun of her for having a blog, she makes fun of their snootiness, and they all have a laugh. At one of these parties, she meets a writer from the Times who wants to profile her. Her husband points out that the Times can be pretty snide in their profiles, but she says she doesn’t care anymore.
19. In the final days of the project, the profile appears and her answering machine fills up with book offers! She’s going to get published after all! BUT… on the very last day, as Julie prepares for a celebratory dinner party, her new publisher tells her they’ve gotten a cease and desist letter from Julia Child’s lawyers saying that Julie is profiting off her name! Julie is devastated. The husband says that he should have realized this would happen. He tells her it’s time to finally finish reading Julia’s book… …Julie abandons her cooking and reads…
20. …We see what we didn’t see in the movie: Julia is now famous and everybody wants to put her name on cheap stuff. She decides to never lend out her name to any thing that wasn’t her idea. No exceptions. Her husband applauds her integrity. End of Julia’s story.
21. But Julie, reading this, is devastated, even though she realizes now why Julia will never understand. Her publisher asks if they should honor the cease and desist letter. They need an answer right away. She panics… Maybe she just wasn’t meant to have a book… But she has guests coming and her food is boiling over… She panics: “We’ll apologize to our guests. And we’ll apologize to Julia herself and maybe then she’ll…” The door rings… An early guest… She throws open the door: “Never apologize!”
22. Title cards comes up over their happy dinner party, saying that Julia died the next year. Julie regretted that she never got a chance to tell Julia in person how much she admired her… …but she never apologized.
    

Basically, this is Harold and Maude. (Forty-year-old spoilers here:) “You taught me not to want to commit suicide, but now I realize that you were planning your own suicide this whole time. So does this undo all that you’ve taught me? No! I still believe it even if you never did. I’ve passed the ultimate test of my new philosophy!”

So does all this (and I apologize for the length) add up to a good movie? Not really, but it just has to be good enough to justify flashing back to the wonderful Julia Child stuff. Hopefully, all of the above plot would be quite a bit shorter than the flashbacks themselves, making it Streep and Tucci’s movie, as it always should have been.