Julia Child in her kitchen. [Photograph ©Lynn Gilbert, 1978, Cambridge, Massachusetts]
“Julia,” the documentary by Oscar nominees Betsy West and Julie Cohen about Pasadena-born chef, author and TV personality Julia Child, has been shortlisted in the Academy Awards documentary category, according to Awards Daily, months after premiering at the 48th Telluride Film Festival in September.
Review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, which categorizes reviews as either positive or negative, has also reported that 98 percent of 96 reviews on “Julia” were positive. Among the reviews, it had an average rating of 7.80 out of 10.
On Metacritic, “Julia” has a weighted average score of 71 out of 100 based on 20 critical reviews, indicating “generally favorable reviews.”
The documentary, a collaboration with CNN Films, was released on November 5, 2021, by Sony Pictures Classics.
The film uses footage from Child’s archives as a TV personality in middle age, years after she worked in the Office of Strategic Studies (OSS), the precursor to the CIA.
It also has pieces from Child’s home movies as she was growing up in Pasadena, obtained with permission from her estate.
The Hollywood Reporter said Child receives “an affectionate and respectful but also quietly sensuous tribute” in the film.
“Just as its subject, the cookbook writer and TV cooking show pioneer, managed to do with French food for the American masses, this serves up traditional bio-doc fare but tweaks the formula and ingredients ever so slightly, adding highly styled macro-shot cooking sequences in order to suit the palates of food-loving viewers of a certain age,” the Hollywood Reporter’s Leslie Felperin writes. “The result is a little safe and a teensy bit dull compared to some of the more adventurous efforts in the world of film-as-food-porn these days, but that’s fine. This will hit the spot for viewers and possibly awards-bestowing bodies who hunger for stories of audacious, norm-shattering women.”
On Deadline, which also reports “Julia” is in contention for an Oscar nomination, Betsy West tells how Child changed her perspective about how she and Julie Cohen were growing up in a time of frozen food, weird Jell-O salads, mushroom soup casserole.
“Julia’s the reason why cooking shows are so incredibly popular, why Americans are much more adventure-some in the kind of food they eat,” West said. “Julia introduced us to French food, but it just took off from there and America is a very different place after Julia.”
Using archived footage, personal photos, first-person narratives, and cutting-edge, mouth-watering food cinematography, the documentary traces Julia Child’s 12-year struggle to create and publish the revolutionary “Mastering the Art of French Cooking,” which has sold more than 2.5 million copies since publication in 1961, and her rapid ascent to become the country’s most unlikely television star.
Child was born in Pasadena on August 15, 1912, as Julia Carolyn McWilliams. Her father, John McWilliams, Jr., was a Princeton University graduate and prominent land manager, and her mother, Julia Carolyn Weston, was a paper-company heiress whose father was Byron Curtis Weston, a lieutenant-governor of Massachusetts.
Child attended Pasadena’s Polytechnic School from 4th grade to 9th grade. In high school, she was sent to the Katherine Branson School in Ross, which was at the time a boarding school. She played tennis, golf, and basketball as a young woman. She attended Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts, and graduated in 1934 with a major in history.
After graduating, Child moved to New York City, where she worked as a copywriter for the advertising department of W. & J. Sloane. In 1942, she joined the OSS after finding that she was too tall to enlist in the Women’s Army Corps or in the U.S. Navy’s WAVES. She was six-foot-two.
She started with OSS as a typist at the Washington, DC headquarters, but was later given a more responsible position working directly for General William J. Donovan, head of the OSS. Her work took her to Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) in Asia, China, and to Europe, where she later married Paul Child, who was also an OSS employee and who later joined the U.S Foreign Service after the war.
Her husband was assigned to Paris with the U.S. Information Agency, and it was there that Julia Child was introduced to fine cuisine. She began to love French cuisine, which she introduced to the American audience in her first book, “Mastering the Arts of French Cuisine,” subsequent writings, and her later TV shows.
“They’ve done a great job of taking on strong female characters,” Courtney Sexton, SVP of CNN Films, said of West and Cohen on Deadline. “With ‘Julia,’ they also had a really interesting idea on how to attack the food aspect of it and make it feel elevated and cinematic. And when they pitched this idea of macro food cinematography, alongside this compelling story, we were immediately taken.”
