Pretty Eat Pray Love a Lifeless Trip
Popular New York based travel writer Liz Gilbert (Julia Roberts) is not happy with her life. She doesn’t like being married to her husband Stephen (Billy Crudup). She feels like she’s being a poor friend to her longtime confidant Delia Shiraz (Viola Davis). Even a fling with young actor David Piccolo (James Franco) brings her no sense of contentment or happiness, something eating away from within making her misery virtually without end.
Javier Bardem and Julia Roberts in Eat Pray Love © Sony Pictures
And so she decides to escape. For the next year she will travel to Italy, India and Bali and try to find her spiritual center. Liz will eat what she wants to eat, work where she wants to work and pray where she wants to pray. She will try and find her center, will attempt to ease her pain, end her suffering and maybe learn to love the one person she’s never felt comfortable being around – herself.
I have not read Elizabeth Gilbert’s memoir Eat Pray Love. I do not know how director and co-writer Ryan Murphy’s (“Glee,” Running with Scissors) adaptation compares to the source material. All I do know is that for 135 or so minutes the only consistent thing I wanted to do while watching this movie version was to get up and leave. I did not like Liz, didn’t like her at all, and no matter how amazing her journey became or how spiritual her quest was supposed to be the only thing I felt for the woman was almost constant disgust.
Her reasons to go on this year-long trip failed to move me in any way whatsoever. I found the woman to be selfish, narcissistic and by the time everything was over I didn’t actually believe she learned anything new about herself. I couldn’t find anything that made me think Liz wouldn’t just act the same way again in the future, that she wouldn’t hurt someone else the same way she devastated Stephen back at the start of the film. There was no sense of closure as far as I was concerned, no impression that the epiphanies she supposedly had come to had resonated, and for that reason alone I was never able to accept her supposed happiness towards life and love as the film ended.
I get it. We’re all unhappy at times. My life has certainly not gone unaffected by recent economic events, and I know for certain there are moments I regret many of the choices I’ve made over the past thirty or so years. I can be depressed, and I can certainly feel lonely, and more often than I care to admit I often fantasize how great it would be to check out and disappear to become a creature of the world lost amidst its various peoples and cultures.
My guess is it is those very feelings that caused Gilbert’s memoir to resonate deeply with so many readers, but what can be accomplished in prose isn’t always as easy to capture on celluloid and whatever spiritual meaning her story has this movie version doesn’t come even close to doing something similar. This Liz isn’t a person I’d want to spend two minutes with let alone two hours, and while I completely buy the fact emotional pain and suffering have little to do with a person’s wealth or status at a certain point a part of me wanted to scream at her to grow a backbone and just be thankful for what success has brought her.
I admit some of this diatribe is being a tiny bit overly harsh. I wasn’t in complete misery, at least not for the entire running time. The Italy sequence is actually pretty darn good, a few moments here and there of fresh, unadulterated honesty speaking such sparkling truths I couldn’t help but smile. There’s a great scene inside a Naples pizzeria that was absolute perfection, while an earlier, much quieter sequence featuring Liz gobbling up a plate of spaghetti held me happily captivated.
The film also looks amazing. The great Robert Richardson (Shutter Island, JFK) shoots things with an almost effortless beauty, his pristine visuals speaking more to the spiritual significance of things than anything going on inside Murphy and Jennifer Salt’s screenplay. This was one of those movies where I almost wished I could turn off the dialogue, get rid of the sound effects and just watch Richardson’s visuals bob and weave alongside Dario Marianelli’s (Atonement) exquisite score, that combination alone almost worth the price of a matinee admission all by themselves.
There are also a number of fine supporting performances, including Richard Jenkins’ mesmerizing turn as a bumper sticker spouting Texan who helps Liz start to find her center while at an Indian ashram. I also thought Javier Bardem was quite good oozing sexy charm as a Brazilian expatriate now living in Bali, the Oscar-winner stealing my heart so completely I almost wished the movie had revolved entirely around him.
The thing is none of this mattered because I just didn’t like the main character and didn’t believe she’d actually learned anything from her travels. Roberts tries her best, but Liz is so sketchily written she never has the chance to resonate. I get her pain. I get her suffering. I get all of that and more. What I don’t get is why anyone would want to spend time with her when in the end she constantly refuses change the emotional inner workings that make her tick. For that reason Eat Pray Love ended up being an endurance test, and as travelogue adventures go this is one trip I never plan on taking ever again.
Film Rating: ê1/2 (out of 4)
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