What could be better to Honolulu foodies than food?

Meryl Streep as Julia Child.

Monday night, chef George Mavrothalassitis and his wife, Donna Jung, invited a couple hundred of their friends — chefs, restaurateurs, food purveyors, farmers, press, culinary educators and students — to a theater at the Ward Entertainment Center to view a preview of "Julie & Julia," a new film written by Nora Ephron about cookbook writer and TV personality Julia Child and blogger Julie Powell. Powell's claim to fame is having cooked her way through Child's "Mastering the Art of French Cooking" in the course of a year.

Five hundred-plus recipes. Three hundred sixty-five days. An unsuccessful novelist and a government employee in a frustrating job, Powell started out slow, but after a while, food lovers began to pay attention. The press found her. But still she cooked and cooked and wrote and wrote.

And in this film, her effort is chronicled alongside Child's own years of cooking and cooking and writing and writing. Child with her friends Simone Beck and Louisette Bertholle wrote the book that would unlock for an English-language audience the mysteries of reproducing the French cuisine she enjoyed with great relish while stationed in France with her husband, Paul, a diplomat.

It is difficult to convey how charming this film is. How multi-layered. How pleasing. How it unfolds for the viewer, almost exactly as did the personal journeys of each of its protagonists, as they cooked and wrote their way out of lives that had felt purposeless.

The audience Monday night — what is that old Broadway chestnut? "They laughed, they cried"? — they laughed, they clapped, they buzzed with asides. For more than two hours, they were entranced by Streep as Child and Amy Adams as Powell.

The movie is precisely attuned to times and place and subject matter. The filmic food was so exquisite in sight and sound, from the first tomato bruschetta to the stuffed and boned duck that was Powell's piece de resistance.

The depiction of the publishing industry was spot on, as the British say.

Stanley Tucci as Child's husband, Paul, and Chris Messina as Powell's husband, Eric, were so dear. The love stories were so unexpected, not sugar-coating the fact that being married to the wonderfully right person still does not guarantee fulfillment; everyone needs something of their own.

For Julia and Julie, fulfillment was boeuf bourguignonne so well executed that the book's editor, the legendary Judith Jones, moans when she first tastes it. And (this is something only a cookbook writer could understand) a good index.

Will the film "play in Peoria?" Probably not. There are no car crashes or explosions. You have to love food. You have to understand the milieu a little. The more you know about Julie and Julia, the more it will enchant you.

The cuts between Julie and Julia's lives are sometimes abrupt. The end, in which Julie finds out that Julia doesn't care for her blog or her cooking effort, was to me not successful. Still, I'm planning to buy the DVD. I don't buy many DVDs. But I know this one will be the high point on some future bleak Sunday afternoons.

"Julie & Julia" opens Aug. 7. If the sight of a perfectly carmelized wedge of bread and a tomato so red it glows excites you; if you resonate to the idea of people in love and enjoying life (a seemingly out-of-reach idea these days); if you wish to know the secret of beurre blanc; if you think Meryl Streep is a genius, go see this movie.