Eat Pray Love Happily Ever After?

After her bitter divorce, writer Elizabeth Gilbert traveled the world for a year. In Italy she ate and learned the language; in India she joined an ashram and meditated. In Bali, her final destination, she planned to devote herself to prayer, studying under a wizened medicine man named Ketut. Instead, she fell in love with a Brazilian businessman, achieving inner peace and a happy ending for the memoir she was already under contract to write. That book, Eat, Pray, Love, was released in 2006 and went on to become a publishing phenomenon, selling more than 7 million copies worldwide.

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Most women brave enough to set out on such an adventure might come back with a diary they’d be obliged to call Eat, Pray, Dysentery. The symmetry of that convenient love, capping off the year — Gilbert is now married to the man she met in Bali, whom she calls Felipe in that book and this year’s best-selling sequel, Committed — is a bit hard to swallow for some of us. Its fairy-tale quality, the one by which a woman’s quest ends with a man, seemed less like real life and more like a Julia Roberts movie.

Which is why I found myself rather happily anticipating Eat Pray Love, the big-screen version of Gilbert’s book directed by Glee and Nip/Tuck creator Ryan Murphy. (He shares a screenplay credit for the movie with Jennifer Salt.) Now that Eat, Pray, Love had lost its commas and become a movie actually starring Julia Roberts, I was no longer annoyed by how much it seemed like one; it had assumed its rightful place in the entertainment universe.

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With a running time of 140 minutes that feels even longer, the film is hardly the playful frolic you’d hope for from Murphy, whose Glee is often 42 of the most joyous minutes on television. But Gilbert devotees should be thrilled with the film. Eat Pray Love is a lushly photographed adaptation that glosses over some details (like the fact that Liz got an advance to write about her spiritual journey) and takes the liberty of creating a sensible best-girlfriend character, Liz’s publisher Delia (the no-nonsense Viola Davis). But it’s otherwise a faithful rendering of Gilbert’s text. The food styling is sumptuous — I will dream of something I took to be a zucchini blossom oozing cheese — and the stunning locations include many of the places Gilbert actually frequented, among them Ketut’s house in Bali. (The medicine man is played by Hadi Subiyanto, a flute player the filmmakers found in Jakarta.)

(See more about Eat Pray Love tourism in Bali.)

As for Roberts, she’s just right for the role of Gilbert, who is also tall and pretty and charismatic. Roberts looks fetching devouring pizza. She looks fetching in various sacklike ethnic outfits. She graciously allows herself to be shot looking haggard, although these images are usually closely followed by a demonstration of her breathtaking luminosity in, say, a to-die-for sari. (Outfits, jewelry and furnishings from the film, as well as goodies like Eat Pray Love–inspired soap, are available for sale on the Home Shopping Network.) And when her brown eyes well up with tears of gratitude, empathy or fear — as they often do — rather than making Liz seem like a crybaby, they convey a deep psychic wound, one the universe really should heal if it has any decency.

Have Ex, Will Travel
Yet it’s a vaguely sourced wound, and her angst has a tepid quality, even though Liz’s rationales for being a runaway wife and girlfriend are more fleshed out here than in Gilbert’s frustratingly discreet memoir. As Felipe (Javier Bardem) says after she’s rejected his offer of a romantic vacation on a desert isle, “What’s the problem, Liz?” The same question might cross the minds of moviegoers. Liz’s ex-husband Stephen (Billy Crudup) is no obvious villain, just a feckless sort who by his own admission has a tendency to get “sidetracked” (one semester of law school, some fleeting culinary experience, now pondering a master’s in education). And while it is clear she doesn’t want to have children — when Delia hands her infant son to Stephen, Liz regards the package of baby and husband as if it were a bad oyster she might be obliged to swallow — it isn’t clear he’s particularly desirous of them either.

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It’s when Liz (still negotiating her divorce in New York City) takes up with an actor named David (James Franco) that she starts to seem less like a woman in an existential crisis than a woman with lousy taste in men. David is supposed to be her soul mate, but Murphy and Franco render him a self-dramatizing bohemian. Everyone, even Franco, seems to be laughing at the character. After a dinner party, Delia’s salt-of-the-earth husband Andy (the delightful Mike O’Malley) drains the joy out of the romance by astutely noting how Liz and David, in matching leather jackets, seem to be morphing into each other — just as, after several years of marriage, Liz had started to look and dress like Stephen.

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So even if we can’t take her pain all that seriously, we see why Liz needed to light out for foreign lands. I just wish Andy had turned up with an occasional care package to deliver some leveling, sensible comment. In Rome he might have pointed out that even as she aspires to dolce far niente — the sublimely Italian art of doing nothing — Liz suffers an anxiety of observation and a chronic need to define her state of being. He could have interrupted a depressingly chick-flickish scene in which Liz and her Swedish pal Sofi (Tuva Novotny) try to fit into tiny jeans to note that the women, inspired by Liz’s bracing speech about empowering herself to enjoy eating, had initially gone shopping for bigger jeans. His take on Liz’s year abroad as a whole, in fact, might have been that beautiful white people enjoy listening rapturously to moral lectures and fortune-cookie affirmations delivered by the old, the unattractive or the darker-skinned. Liz, of course, is the most obvious recipient of these wisdoms, and Roberts receives them beatifically. Her smile is still dazzlingly divine, but Eat Pray Love would not have suffered from a grin trim.

(Read an interview with author Elizabeth Gilbert.)

A Meditative Detour
Even, I suspect, for loyalists, Eat Pray Love will bog down in India, because while food consumption is fun to watch, the emptying of the mind is not. And then there’s Richard from Texas (Richard Jenkins), the font of supposed wisdom Liz meets at the ashram. In real life, Richard Vogt, who dubbed Gilbert “Groceries” because she ate so much, became an Oprah-feted celebrity in his own right before his death earlier this year. Jenkins’ natural dryness balances some of the sappy stuff Richard spouts, but even so, the character is mysteriously invasive. Why does this man feel so compelled to badger Liz with nicknames and complain about her lousy meditation habits?

Nonetheless, one of Richard’s bossy slogans resonates: “You want to get to the castle, Groceries, you’ve got to swim the moat.” He might have been talking about the movie. It’s a shame our particular moat, the ashram of Pray, is so exhausting, because in the Love section Bardem proves himself a worthy castle. A man who looks like that should not, in theory, be able to pull off the role of a romantically wounded pussycat. But he does, and watching the relationship between Liz and Felipe evolve from a comforting friendship to a love that’s both companionable and sexy is gratifying. Liz may have been self-involved — when she responds to Ketut’s loving welcome of “You, you, you” with “Me, me, me!” she might not be joking — but we’re still pleased to see her get her Julia Roberts–style happy ending.

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