If any living actress casts the kind of shadow across her world that Julia Child cast over American cuisine, it is Meryl Streep. So pity the actress who dares to perform against her — and tip your hat to one who does it twice, and survives.
Amy Adams fares less well in "Julie & Julia" than she did as Streep's dissenting subordinate nun in "Doubt," which is fitting for a film in which an unaccomplished, insecure woman sets out to walk in a legend's shoes for a year and will count herself lucky just to reach the finish line.
 Courtesy photo: Sony Pictures Amy Adams plays Julie Powell in the film.
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Julie Powell, a former Austinite whose blog led to this film, is a frustrated writer whose depressing day job (working with those affected by the World Trade Center attacks) makes her insecure around her nasty, moneyed friends. After hearing about the attention other writers have found through blogging, she hits on a novel project: Over the course of a year, this amateur cook and budding Child devotee will attempt every recipe in "Mastering the Art of French Cooking," keeping an online journal for an audience she hardly expects to materialize.
Since that effort has led to a major motion picture by romantic-comedy hit-meister Nora Ephron, it won't spoil anything to reveal that a great many Web-surfing foodies indeed discovered Powell's blog. But "Julie & Julia" — Powell's half of it — is less about the ups and downs of Internet traffic than about the writer's efforts to prove her worth and forge a career without allowing a year of late-night suppertimes and botched-recipe tantrums destroy her marriage.
Let's not pretend, though, that the present-day plot can approach the appeal of the parallel post-World War II story line in which we watch a former secretary from America fall madly in love with France, with food and with the identity she crafts for herself as a great interpreter of both for American audiences. Streep is an unalloyed joy to watch in this role — animating the fearless Child with a winning sense of humor and giddy curiosity.
Watching Child poke fun at herself while conquering an all-male chef's school or manhandling a duck carcass is so enjoyable, many viewers will want more, but the truth is that the unequally matched halves of "Julie and Julia" are also an asset. The present-day story frees the earlier one from the conventions of biopics, letting it entertain us without needing to squash events into an arbitrary dramatic structure.
(The movie also, of course, produces some mouth-watering images of perfectly prepared fish, creamy chocolate mousse, and so on, although the dining scenes aren't as sustained as those in "Babette's Feast" or as rapturous as in "Big Night.")
Though "Julie & Julia" is hardly a film for the ages, it might make you wish for more films like it: movies that find a way to let gifted actors dance through a real subject's life without all the heaviness and predictability associated with big-screen biographies. Not five-course meals of a life story, say, but small plates and side dishes, allowing us to sample rich pleasures like Streep's Child and then move on while the taste still lingers.
