There must be something of substance in Julie & Julia because I keep thinking about it. Specifically, I keep calling to mind some reviewers’ comments about Amy Adams and her performance. The more I consider her acting work, the better I think it is.
I have not read Julie Powell’s book, so I don’t know if the movie is a good interpretation. The movie shows us two women, living two different lives, with an intergenerational connection through influence. But while we see both women in parallel tracks, needing something to occupy their excess imagination, energy, and creativity, the starting point is quite different for each woman.
Even through her grief over no children, Julia lives life with relish and delight. She revels in every bite she eats when she’s in Paris, every new friend she makes, each moment her beloved husband steps into the room. When she seeks an outlet, she is seeking a vessel large enough to contain her joy, her passion, and her energy. She tries hat making lessons, and when she sighs, you can feel her boredom as if she had sighed it out in the chair right next to you. She tries bridge lessons, and her eyes don’t so much roll as they just wander. There’s no engagement, no conversation between the bridge partners, nothing to grab her.
It’s when she takes cooking lessons that a possible occupation for her verve shows its face. After all, she adores delicious food, she is with people, and when she finally enrolls in the Cordon Bleu, she has a place for her adventurous edge and her competitive – and good humored – spirit. She was joy and she sought joy.
But Julie starts from ennui. One might call it acedia. A-cedia comes from roots that mean to be without care, that is, to care for nothing, have no interest, wallowing in numbness. That Julie would be immersed in ennui is no surprise: she moves to an apartment with a tiny kitchen and shelves that don’t stay up. Her walk is full of resignation to blankness (and Amy Adams subtle acting here exhibits fine nuance). There is no spring to her step as she goes to work. Once at work she is in the cubicle, that gray box, answering phone calls of anger, sorrow, and deep need for victims of 9/11. She is helpless in the face of almost all of these phone calls, and all she can tell most of them is to fill out paperwork. In this cell of hers, we might be reminded of a monastic monk who must do the same task over and over again. Especially when she yearns to be a writer, and is faced with her own supposed failure, this gray cell becomes a prison instead of a study.
Interestingly, she ends up addressing this ennui in much the same way sage monastics would advise young adherents. It is through daily tasks, through the utterly mundane tedium of keeping a daily practice, that one creates space for joy and for the springs of life. In this sort of stability one is able to be present and to learn mindfulness. How often have we heard parents speak of the routines of their lives being the space of vivid and treasured moments of joy? Every day those children have to be readied for school. But being present to that routine allows the parent to be available when heartbreaks come home from the classroom, or when a child is spilling over with delight at a discovery. By committing herself to a daily, year-long practice of cooking from Mastering the Art of French Cooking and daily blogging about her practice, she is visited by revelation upon revelation. She learns about her lack of confidence, her ambitions and dreams, her loving husband, her tendency towards self-absorption, her capacity for cooking extraordinary meals in her tiny kitchen. And when she still, daily, goes to her cell at work, it gradually becomes a place of monastic sisterhood – sharing her cooking and blogging triumphs with a fellow “monastic” – and a place of monastic freedom, where she does have the chance to help people. She grows into caring.
In the end, Julia too fights ennui at various times, as the book she writes becomes a long, long process over many years instead of the two she originally predicted. She meets disappointments with a co-author and with publishers, and she gets discouraged. She has within her the natural resource that fights acedia: she cares very much indeed, has a lust for life that stops ennui from growing. Joy is her immune system against ennui.
I suppose I still think the movie is mostly about writing. But there are deeper spiritual truths here we might all heed, and I noticed these because I came across a quotation from David Stendl-Rast:
“Wherever we may come alive, that is the area in which we are spiritual.”
We might add that this spirituality becomes ….a simmering boeuf bourguignon, a scent that infuses the whole self.
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