I'm surprised that on 18 Dec 2021 I'm only the third person to review this movie. And the first two reviews read very much as if they were written by the pr company handling the marketing of this film. Unlike them, I don't think this is the greatest thing since sliced bread (which wasn't so great), but it's a very fine documentary that does a solid job of presenting the life and achievements of a very interesting American woman.
It starts out not slow, but somewhat bloated. There is too much unnecessary filler, and too many people exaggerating both how bad American home cooking was in the 1950s and 60s and how much Child changed Americans' way of life.
Child grew up in an America where the wealthy, such as her family, had cooks, so that the wife did not herself get involved with daily meal preparation. The rest of American housewives did not, by and large, see cooking as a chance to be creative and develop their own personalities.
My mother, for example, only relied on frozen tv dinners as a last resort, unlike what you see in the tv ads from the 50s in this movie. She, like most American housewives of the 50s, felt they were shortchanging their husbands and especially children if they did not provide a home-cooked meal every night. I still make some of her recipes, and they are still good.
Child's real innovation was not, therefore, that she convinced American housewives to actually cook dinner: they were already doing that. She introduced the French idea of cooking as an art. Housewives certainly took pride in presenting good meals to their families before her, but the range of what they cooked was more limited, and the recipes were not that fancy. It was pretty much meat, potatoes (or pasta), and veggies. The highest praise was that it was filling.
Child gave women-middle and upper-class women, at least-the idea that there could be something intellectually rewarding about preparing a variety of different dishes. Going past meatloaf could be rewarding, even if hubbie was perfectly satisfied with it.
Once we get past that part of the movie and into Child's life, it's really pretty much all gravy. I was amazed at all the photos and home movies the staff found, some even of intimate moments. (I gather Child's husband, Paul, set up cameras in their homes to take pictures of them together.) The talking heads in the center of the movie know what they're saying, speak authoritatively, and don't go off on dithyrambs of encomia.
If you want real detail on how Child wrote her first, best-known book, Mastering the Art of French Cooking, you'll need to read her book about her life in France, which is a great read. 90 minute documentaries can't get into that sort of detail.
On the other hand, this documentary does a nice job of covering other, non-culinary aspects of her life, such as her support of gay and abortion rights.
Good use is made of both diaries and letters.
In short, a very fine movie.
