95 min | PG-13 | November 5, 2021 | Sony Pictures Classics
A six-foot-two woman with a warbling voice teaches America that French food is not a class privilege. The cooking footage glistens and Julia Child remains a force of nature. The movie loves her too much to ask a hard question.
Julia Child arrives in Paris in her late thirties knowing how to eat and nothing about how to cook. By the time she dies she has taught a nation that food is worth caring about. Julie Cohen and Betsy West build their documentary around that transformation and stack it with archival footage, talking heads, and slow loving shots of butter hitting a pan. The film is about Julia Child. It is also about the appetite she gave permission to a postwar America that ate from cans.
Julia Child appears almost entirely in archival footage and runs away with her own movie. She is six foot two with a warbling voice and zero self-consciousness, dropping a chicken on the floor and putting it right back in the pan. José Andrés talks about her with the reverence of a man who built a career in the door she opened. Ruth Reichl and Sara Moulton supply the institutional memory and the harder edges, including the marriage and the ambition underneath the public clowning. Ina Garten and Marcus Samuelsson serve more as fans than witnesses, and the film leans on them when it should push harder.
Cohen and West directed the RBG documentary and bring the same template here. They favor warmth over interrogation. The cinematography treats the cooking inserts like fashion photography, with shallow focus and golden light on eggs cracking and sauces folding, and these sequences carry more sensory force than any interview. The editing cuts cleanly between the food and the biography but never lets the two collide into anything uncomfortable. The score stays bright and unobtrusive, which is the whole problem.
This is a generous portrait that declines to dig. The directors find the loneliness in the marriage and the cost of fame and then back away before either lands. They are happier celebrating Julia than examining her, and the result flatters its subject the way she flattered her audience. The film makes you hungry. It does not make you think.