So the movie glides, for more than an hour, like butter in a hot skillet. But it doesn’t glide witlessly. We jump back and forth between France, where Child is the 36-year-old wife of Paul Child (Stanley Tucci), a Foreign Service officer, and New York, where Powell lives in a cute apartment above a pizzeria with her husband, Eric (Chris Messina).
The movie begins with neither woman really knowing what to do with herself. Child takes French classes, learns to play bridge, tries hat making. None of it suits her. She winds up trying to enroll in the Cordon Bleu culinary school, over the objections of an imperious headmistress who, once Child is accepted, wishes her nothing but ill. These scenes of this giant, vaguely slouchy American woman (Child stood 6 foot 2) towering over tiny, meticulous men at a counter are a riot. One of her goals is to master the art of the minced onion. She sets her knife to dozens, which gives Tucci an opportunity to do some tickling pinpoint slapstick upon seeing and presumably smelling the eye-watering aroma that a pitcher’s mound of chopped onions produces.
This is blissful moviemaking. Much of the pleasure we have in watching it comes from seeing Tucci and, obviously, Streep connect. But it’s also the effortlessness Ephron reveals in bringing it all together. There could have been something cartoonish about Streep, who usually appears to be standing on a box to approximate Child’s height. But beneath each of these scenes, between Streep and Tucci, and Streep and the women playing her French coauthors of “Mastering the Art of French Cooking’’ (Linda Emond and Helen Carrey) and her sister (Jane Lynch), between Streep and the vegetables playing the food, is a deep, abiding joy. It’s not just the onions that bring a tear to the eye.
