Eat Pray Love (2010)

Eat Pray Love is a testament to the merits of genius casting. After all, only an actress as effortlessly graceful, effervescent, and disarming as Julia Roberts could make a chick-lit tome turned self-help chick-flick feel like the best vacation I’ve never taken.
 
Before this review turns into a never-ending ode to Julia Roberts, I should tell you that Eat Pray Love is a film adaptation of Elizabeth Gilbert’s wildly popular best-selling memoir of the same name. Liz (that’s what everyone calls her), a New York City based writer, realizes that things aren’t right in her eight-year marriage to affable but unfocused Stephen (Billy Crudup). No sooner does she file for divorce than she meets David, a good-looking young actor (James Franco), with whom she has a volatile rebound romance. That relationship proves to be a bad fit, too, and Liz finds herself in an existential crisis.
 
Liz has no idea who she is when she’s not someone’s daughter, wife, or girlfriend. So she embarks on a yearlong journey to Italy, India, and Indonesia–countries that start with “I”–to find out who she is when she’s alone.

But friendly Liz is rarely alone no matter where she goes. In her world travels, she meets a whole new cadre of friends who bring with them life lessons. In Rome, Luca Spaghetti (Guiseppe Gandini) teaches her to appreciate pleasure over entertainment, to communicate with her hands Italian-style, and to make love to big heaping bowls of rigatoni, linguine, and, yes, spaghetti. In an Indian ashram, she meets Richard from Texas (Richard Jenkins), who helps her to understand true loss and letting go. And in Bali, she learns to smile from her liver from a shaman named Ketut (Hadi Subyanto) and to love again from a gorgeous, heavy-tongued Brazilian divorcee named Felipe (Javier Bardem).
 
Adapted for the screen by Jennifer Salt and Ryan Murphy (who also directs), Eat Pray Love gets it mostly right.  Murphy infuses healthy doses of Gilbert’s original text (through both dialogue and voiceover narration) with breathtaking panoramas of the story’s three locations. But the colorful flowers and jewel-toned saris at an Indian wedding and the endless blue of Indonesian waterways pale in comparison to the deliciousness of Italy. Murphy’s camera zooms in on plates of asparagus dripping in olive oil, cantaloupe draped in prosciutto, and pasta drenched in marinara. They say you shouldn’t grocery shop on an empty stomach. The same is true of the first half of this film.
 
It must be said, however, that it’s not the noodles, the saris, or the waters you’ll continuously fall in love with in this film. It’s how Ms. Roberts joyously twirls her fork (once, sitting in her dilapidated Roman apartment alone in a silky negligee), wraps herself in emerald-colored silk, and frolics in the deep. Her whooping-crane laugh and mile-wide grin are every bit as infectious now as they were when we first fell in love with her 20 years ago. She’s come a long way, but she is still a pretty woman.
 
To Roberts’s credit, she delivers a subtle, nuanced performance that doesn’t rely solely on her personal charms. A beautiful woman of means, Liz and her problems could seem like irritating non-issues if it weren’t for the actress’s ability to downplay the histrionics. In fact, her simultaneous strength and vulnerability reminded me of Katharine Hepburn’s role in 1955’s Summertime (about an American spinster vacationing in Venice). And I don’t make comparisons to Kate the Great lightly.
 
There are also some terrific performances turned in by the supporting players, most notably Richard Jenkins as a cantankerous dispenser of bumper-sticker wisdom who calls Liz “Groceries” because of her prodigious appetite. Many of his scenes may have been intended as comic relief, but the actor imbues them all with a layer of damaged gruffness. Hadi Subyanto’s toothless playfulness is a welcome scene-stealer, Viola Davis is a delight as Liz’s wry, no-nonsense editor, and Javier Bardem is suitably swarthy and Latin. I wish there had been more for him to do. He is only given one real “moment”, when his professions of love are rebuffed by Liz, but he absolutely shines in it.
 
My only substantial complaint about Eat Pray Love is its 133-minute running time. It is possible to get too much of a good thing. Fortunately, Julia Roberts is not one of those things.