The phrase, “Well behaved women rarely make history,” attributed to Pulitzer Prize-winning historian and Harvard professor Lauren Thatcher Ulrich, gets bandied about a lot these days in conversations about women who push the boundaries of acceptable feminine behavior. But that particular brand of feminism, in which women are allowed to be anti-heroes in search of their ambition, rarely seems to rear its head in the slew of recent documentaries and series about women who made history in the mid-20th century.
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Julia Child is a conflicted figure in the annals of historic women. HBO Max’s “Julia” focuses on the first season of her beloved public television show, “The French Chef.” Child, played here by Sarah Lancashire, was not the first chef on TV, nor the first woman. But her show did create the template modern cooking shows have followed, and it strived to make French food and cooking accessible to Americans. This eight-episode comedy series uses the framework of Child’s start as a TV personality to tell a small part of her story. In portraying the show within the show, the series runs into its first challenge: getting a modern audience to buy into what makes Julia Child so charming to the public in 1963 after we’ve long been conditioned to far more gregarious chef shows.
Taking some liberties, they set her first cook up to be Coq au Vin, which lends itself to Child making numerous coq jokes (say it out loud…). This is the Aaron Sorkin writing “Saturday Night Live” in “Studio 60” paradox: it’s hard to be funny even if you’re a good writer. Perhaps the only more challenging thing is trying to put one’s thumb on Child’s particular humor. It’s more successful in the second half of the series when the focus pulls away from Child, and we get the backstories and inner lives of the village who helped her produce the show. Her beloved husband and partner in all of her projects, Paul, is aptly played by David Hyde Pierce, whose snobbish character from the “Frasier” days starts him off with banked credibility. Unfortunately, the show paints him as a bit of a buffoon who is often in the way, although indelibly in love with Julia. It’s a missed opportunity to explore their creative relationship and how their interests fed on each other—and the unorthodox way they navigated her star burning brighter while remaining equals. There’s also her good friend Avis DeVoto, played by Bebe Neuwirth, in a role that demands vulnerability but still feels unsatisfying due to its smallness. And her genius book editor Judith Jones (Fiona Glascott), plus the crew at WGBH.
Child was a flawed character, especially at this time in her life. She was experiencing massive success with her cookbook and TV show, but she did not align herself with the women’s liberation movement or feminism. In fact, she held fast to traditional gender roles was and fought for more men to get into the field so it would be taken seriously. She did things that were feminist despite herself, rather than as a political statement. “Julia” attempts to thread the needle, making her our comedic heroine, highlighting a path littered with obstructionist men. The nuance it aims for doesn’t always come through, and it feels like a source of conflict is glided over in favor of honoring our main character. At one point, she’s put at odds with “The Feminine Mystique” author Betty Friedan, who calls out the fact that her show is not helping women find fulfillment in roles outside the home. While Child is left to contemplate if that’s true and if she should go on, the moment has a bucket of cold water thrown on it when her producer, Russ Morash (Fran Kranz), yells that this mouthy woman has missed the whole point of Julia Child.
Two more peculiar moments come when Child returns to her alma mater Smith College and meets a forgotten classmate who decided to embrace an identity as a lesbian after spending an innocent afternoon together. In the episode that follows, Child visits San Francisco and pals around with James Beard (Christian Clemenson), who was openly gay. He takes her to a nightclub to see a drag performance in which she is honored. Child was famously homophobic, an error she would correct in the face of the AIDS crisis a few decades later. In the show, Child makes no real comment on either issue. It is a moment when more deeply examining this fallible person slips just out of reach of the narrative, which seemingly feels pressure to make her into an impossibly perfect icon. In her life, she did evolve. What would those moments have been if the show allowed her to fail and eventually change in subsequent seasons?
There’s a flattening that must happen, both for storytelling purposes and to appeal to a modern audience when we recount the histories of real people. In this series, Child’s flame burns brighter when the camera lets the people around her in. It would have been nice if the show believed in its title character enough to let her be flawed and expect the audience will find her captivating nonetheless. [B]