Julia Roberts spends 133 minutes trying to find herself in Eat Pray Love, and finally does so. (Turns out she was there all along.) The long version: same as the short version only with some burning ethical questions, like for instance are we really supposed to care that Liz Gilbert, Julia Roberts’ character – who has money, friends, a loving husband, lives a good life and, let’s face it, looks like Julia Roberts – feels hollow or dissatisfied or whatever? Talk about First World problems.
To be fair, the film has this covered. It begins with Liz talking in voice-over (there’s a lot of voice-over in this movie) about one of her friends, a New York shrink who found herself working with Cambodian boat people, long-suffering wretches who’d been through the Khmer Rouge and the killing fields. How could she possibly relate to such unfortunates? fretted Liz’s friend – but in fact, when the sessions started, all the Cambodians wanted to talk about was relationships, and the guys (or girls) they’d met in concentration camps. “This is how we are,” shrugs Liz – and whether you agree or disagree, the film has a point. People are people, and pain is pain, whether you’re a homeless wino or a rather pretentious playwright (her latest play is called “The Permeable Membrane”!) who looks like Julia Roberts.
At this point, I was rooting for Eat Pray Love. I hate the kind of inverse snobbery that finds the poor and disenfranchised more ‘worthy’ of drama, and I sympathised with Liz’s middle-class angst, the feeling of being trapped and Life passing you by. “We’d only bought this house a year ago. Hadn’t I wanted this?” she asks herself, ‘we’ referring to herself and perfectly nice husband Billy Crudup. “The only thing more impossible than staying is leaving,” laments Liz – but does finally decide to leave Billy, shacking up instead with hunky actor James Franco (“He folded my delicates,” she marvels in a laundrette, after James neatly folds her newly-washed panties; “Girl, you in so much trouble!” replies a large woman sitting nearby). Alas, the James thing doesn’t really work out either – so our heroine goes on a voyage of self-discovery, taking a year off to travel (without working), find her “spark” and get closer to the Things That Matter in Life.
It’s easy to scoff at all this, but it’s actually not too bad (up to this point). Roberts has become an impressive actress in recent years, mostly just by growing older; the extrovert preening that seemed so offensive when she was young is now tinged with sadness and vulnerability (though the big braying laugh is still annoying), and Liz’s problems are at least recognisable. But then she goes off on her journey, a three-part journey as implied by the title – learning to eat in Italy, learning to pray in India, learning to love in Bali – and the film is exposed as ridiculous.
These are some of the things Liz learns in Italy: Italians like to talk with their hands, kiss their fingers when a meal is especially good and bite their forefinger to indicate displeasure. They have names like ‘Luca Spaghetti’. They hang around chatting in barber shops and believe in ‘dolce far niente’, the sweetness of doing nothing (the film seems to have confused Rome with some small sleepy village in Tuscany). They’re ruled by grumpy old women who believe in family values, abhor divorce and think a woman’s place is in the home. If you walk around Rome you will see cobbled streets, nuns eating ice-cream, and the Colisseum.
Who believes this stuff? Parts 2 and 3 aren’t quite as shallow and travelogue-ish – if only because praying and loving are weightier matters than eating – but still pretty risible. India is a matter of mad traffic and arranged marriages, Bali has a toothless shaman and another disapproving older woman (Liz is forever being admonished by dumpy older women) plus a cosy bungalow in the forest – “Paradise!” sighs Liz – and of course a love affair, because “This is Bali; everyone should have a little love affair in Bali”. Javier Bardem is the lucky man, a romantic Brazilian who makes mix-tapes and kisses his teenage son on the mouth to say goodbye. This is apparently what they do in Brazil, Brazilians being another people – like Italians, Indians and Indonesians – whom the film finds adorably quaint.
Eat Pray Love is a silly movie, but it’s a silly movie with pretensions to wisdom (albeit of the self-help variety). In Italy, Liz learns to free herself of guilt over eating too much, though of course she doesn’t get fat – she’s Julia Roberts! – merely buys her jeans in a larger size. In India, she learns to forgive herself and “select your thoughts like you select your clothes” (the speaker is a fellow disciple played by Richard Jenkins, and the film’s main achievement may be in making that reliably great actor look bad in a cringe-inducing Big Speech). In Bali, she learns she must smile not just with her face but “in [her] liver” and also discovers she’s an “in-between”, a seeker of enlightenment.
“Maybe you’re a woman in search of her word,” says someone, and maybe she is. It’s nice that she finally finds it – in between the hearty meals and vows of silence, and occasional bouts of self-pity – but if she’d only looked a little harder, this long and foolish film might’ve been a little shorter. 133 minutes is a lot of self-discovery.
In her wondrous and exotic travels, she experiences the simple pleasure of nourishment by eating in Italy; the power of prayer in India, and, finally and unexpectedly, the inner peace and balance of love in Bali.
Based on an inspiring true story, EAT PRAY LOVE proves that there really is more than one way to let yourself go and see the world.
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| Eat Pray Love book |
copy: http://www.tribute.ca/movies/eat-pray-love/21602/
http://www.cyprus-mail.com/film-review/film-review-eat-pray-love/20101017
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