I’m fine with Nora Ephron’s neck. It’s her movies I feel bad about. They haven’t been so hot in a while. Still, Ephron’s lovely, long languish on bestseller lists with “I Feel Bad About My Neck” gave hope that “Julie and Julia” would be the film that rescued one of the great comic talents in American movies from the doldrums. And I defy any sentient and even minimally informed American movie lover not to have interest piqued by an Ephron film about Julia Child starring Meryl Streep and Amy Adams.

Anyone who remembers Child (she died in 2004 at 91) when she was the awkward and adorable ostrich of PBS cookery and had a central place in what Ephron, long before anyone else, understood to be “the Cuisinarting of America,” would suspect that here is one of the great comic subjects in current movies.

"Julie and Julia"

Three stars

Meryl Streep, Amy Adams and Stanley Tucci in Nora Ephron's film about Julia Child and Julie

Powell, who blogs about her life as she cooks her way through Child's cookbook. Rated PG-13

for language and adult themes. Opening Friday in area theaters.

It turns out, when you see it, that all of Ephron’s brilliance went into two things:

1) Making Meryl Streep, through camera trickery, appear to be Child’s strapping 6- foot-2. I’ve been in the same room with Streep, in a micro-press conference before “Out of Africa,” and she is quite compact. And 2) Paralleling Child’s life story with that of Julie Powell, the young woman who famously blogged about cooking her way through Child’s entire “Mastering the Art of French Cooking.” It’s 684 pages, from Potage Parmentier (Leek or Onion and Potato Soup) — to Glacage au Chocolat (Chocolate butter icing).

What Ephron, the daughter of two screenwriters, found are two lives adrift but spiritually fulfilled by the art of the kitchen and their gifts for writing about it. One, Child, was the wife of an American diplomat (Stanley Tucci), the other a Child worshipper and former editor of the Amherst College literary magazine who fancied herself “a government employee by day and renegade foodie by night.”

That is surpassing structural cleverness. And that’s why, among other things, Ephron has been the on-call script doctor for many films whose names we will, no doubt, never know.

In her first book, “Wallflower at the Orgy,” Ephron’s 1968 piece about “The Food Establishment” (about Child, James Beard, M. F. K. Fisher etc.) begins with the confessed hope that her interviews would be “sublime gourmet experiences with each of my subjects forcing little goodies down my throat. But no. All I got from over twenty interviews were two raw potatoes that were guaranteed by their owner (who kept them in a special burlap bag on her terrace) to be the only potatoes worth eating in all the world. Perhaps they were. I don’t know, though; they tasted exactly like the other potatoes I’ve had in my life.”

Despite the huge quantity of irresistible movie talent that went into “Julie and Julia,” the film pretty much tastes like other well-mannered female empowerment comedies with no special assault on the salivary glands in the foods pictured and no great developments, comic, inspirational or otherwise.

It’s a little bit more sophisticated than some but compared with Ephron’s script for, say, “When Harry Met Sally” or “Heartburn” (based on her notorious marital disaster novel), it seems awfully genteel and even expository, as if beneath all that diametrically opposite adorability from both Streep and Adams, it secretly yearned to be a magazine piece and a not especially witty one at that.

Child, bless her, wanted to pluck French cooking from “a never-never-land” and drop it into “the Here, where happily it is available to everybody.” A great story, to be sure, especially if you mix it up with a long and nicely lusty marriage to a husband (Tucci) who, no matter what, never stopped having a dirty twinkle in his eye.

Child gave American culture what it always yearns for: permission to enjoy verboten things (“Is there anything better than butter?”).

On film, though, that story is not so great.

Same with Julie Powell, whose blog turns into a book offer. The great American romance of The First Book Contract is, to be sure, a very big deal in the real world. It proves to be surprisingly undramatic and parochial on screen.

The true great dramatic moment in the film—where a very old Julia Child is forced, by a third party, to react to her worshipper’s attempt to cook her way through the entire cookbook— is swallowed up entirely by what might be called a fear of vinegar.

It’s impossible not to love Streep’s virtuosic Child impression — and Amy Adams and Stanley Tucci, too. With so much talent in a movie arrayed with such charm, it’s nothing if not pleasant.

But, to quote a restaurant critic I know and love about the extremely well-prepared food in a Niagara-on-the-Lake culinary institution: “You keep on reaching for the salt.”

Exactly.