Bon Appétit!: ‘Julie & Julia’ is delectable and refreshing, if slightly burned around the edges

The bad marriage is such a staple of the modern movie that it has become a bit of a bore.

Watching Kate Winslet and Leonardo DiCaprio go at it in "Revolutionary Road" made me wish, for the first time, that I was watching "Titanic" again.

Maybe that's why there's something almost subversive about Nora Ephron's "Julie & Julia," a smiley-face version of the "The Hours" that substitutes Julia Child for Virginia Woolf, food for suicide, jokes for despair, and startles us with its refreshing portrait of a good marriage.

Less startling is the first-rate contribution of Meryl Streep, who plays the famous cook and who, of late, has discovered the ability to charm an audience.

Years ago I irritated Streep by repeating, in an interview, David Thomson's description of her as America's greatest unloved actress.

She claimed not to know what it meant, but it meant she was a matchless technician whose adaptive perfectionism kept her from creating a persona that audiences could love, the way they once loved Katharine Hepburn or Bette Davis.

That changed with "The Devil Wears Prada," and of course "Mamma Mia." I don't know what changed, exactly, but I think Streep has allowed audiences to see that she's enjoying herself, and they love her for it.

Streep has a ball in "Julie & Julia" portraying Child, the awkward/charming dilettante and expatriate who bluffed her way into Le Cordon Bleu in Paris and wrote a book that made French cooking accessible for Americans.

"Julie and Julia" shows Child as a large and loud American in Paris, but with a strange combination of self-confidence and self-deprecation that makes her popular. Perhaps she learned the gift of diplomacy from her husband (Stanley Tucci), a veteran of the foreign service.

If diplomacy can disarm the French, it can certainly help a marriage, and the movie's depiction of the Childs' mutual devotion is fun and affecting. We're accustomed to seeing matrimony as a kind of Alcatraz, but Child is not imprisoned by hers. She's liberated by it. Her husband nurtures her dream of cooking and writing; He coddles, commiserates, cultivates and sticks with it through several years of development.

Julia responds in kind, a generosity of spirit that differentiates her from Julie Powell (Amy Adams), Childs' contemporary foil. The movies jumps back and forth in time, drawing parallels and contrasts in the lives of the two women.

The comparison doesn't always flatter Julie, who has a loving husband (Chris Messina) but a lousy job and decides to impose discipline and meaning on her messy life by attempting to prepare all of Child's recipes in just one year.

She records her efforts in a blog, and her online labor of Hercules becomes a minor hit that attracts attention and a book deal (and, of course, a movie deal).

Julie, however, does not get the therapeutic benefits for which she had hoped. Her marriage frays, not because her husband isn't supportive, but because Julie has a bad habit of taking him for granted.

She has a bit of a selfish streak, and no doubt Adams, with her famed effervescence, was cast specifically to take the edge off that self-regard.

Still, Julie ends up feeling like a sketchy compromise. Even Streep, with her high-pitched Child impersonation, begins to grate after awhile - Ephron's frothy movie runs 130 minutes. A better recipe would have had it out of the oven at two hours, if not sooner.