Nora Ephron is not a director one associates with risk, but certain aspects of her slick new rom-com do make the mouth grow round with surprise.

Here is a mainstream film that is blatantly anti-Republican and dares to play 9/11 for laughs. Alternately shocking and complacent, it may cause viewers to feel queasy and (pleasantly)disorientated throughout.

The Julia of the title is Julia Childs, the real-life, Left-leaning Fifties cookery star who set out to teach “servantless” American women how to prepare great French food. Meryl Streep plays the outsize, shrieky chef (her Childs, on TV, resembles a dishevelled but optimistic drunk). When we first meet her, she is wildly in love with Paris and her husband Paul (Stanley Tucci). But, as she says, she needs something meaningful to do.

Fifty years on, it’s the same with Julie Powell (Amy Adams), a ground-down government employee who works with victims of the 9/11 disaster. She tells her adorable partner, Eric (Chris Messina), that she wants a mission, so she starts a blog which will document her attempts to cook 524 of Childs’s recipes.

By the time it’s finished, we’ve learnt a lot about the Childses — who ended up investigated by the House Un-American Activities Committee for Paul’s alleged Communism. Meanwhile, Julie’s life has been turned on its head by the success of her blog.

Streep has embraced the chick-flick and, as a result, she’s changed the way we view female middle-age. There’s no such word as “matrician”, but, watching another one of Streep’s spiky-yet-sturdy creations, you realise there should be.

By contrast, poor Adams — usually such a sparky presence — struggles to make an impression. She’s very much in the “adorable” mould, and her child-woman voice and Tweetie Pie eyes prove grating.
Is this film revolutionary? Will it inspire middle-class viewers to go home, fire their “servants” (be they cooks, nannies or cleaners) and get their hands dirty in the rich muck of life? Probably not. Will it increase sales of Childs’s and Powell’s books? Yes, almost certainly.

Julie & Julia is a very American kind of money-spinner. Crucially, though, it is never dumb. “You have no talent,” sniffs one of Childs’s French detractors. “Americans will never know the difference,” she replies.