Review: Eat, Pray, Love

Unhappy, middle-aged, upper middle-class Manhattanite (and apparent writer of some sort) Julia Roberts wakes up to the fact that she no longer wants to be a part of her marriage to loving, if slightly oblivious husband Billy Crudup. After slightly messy divorce proceedings, she shacks up with a young and dopey actor (James Franco). That leaves her similarly unfulfilled after trying for an even lesser amount of time to make it work. So she does what any completely selfish, thoughtless person would do, heads overseas to ‘find herself’. Oh, she jots down a few things here and there to pass the trip off as ‘work’ of course, but really it’s just a big, one-person orgy across the globe. In Rome she indulges in much food and drink (Eat), in India she learns meditation and inner peace (Pray), before ending up in Bali to seek further spiritual enlightenment, and becomes involved with a Brazilian importer-exporter (Javier Bardem) who loves to make mixed tapes. Viola Davis plays Roberts’ married friend and confidant, and Richard Jenkins is a grumpy but amiable cohabitant at the ashram Roberts goes to in India, and has his own (far more relatable) unhappiness in life.

 

Based on an Oprah-endorsed bestselling memoir by author Elizabeth Gilbert, this 2010 excursion into self (re?) discovery is decently directed by Ryan Murphy (creator of “Glee”, which explains just about everything) and acted for what it is and will satisfy its target audience. It’s also a piece of shit that is the exact opposite of who I am as a person and what I want out of other people whom I might choose to interact with. I hated every single second of it, and discounting my opinion because I am not the target audience (being male and unfamiliar with the book) is a cop-out rebuttal for what is an overall unendurable motion picture experience. I can call shit when I see it, and believe me folks, this movie is total kaka of the highest order.

 

This is one of those films about a person wanting to ‘find themselves’, that often involves some kind of spiritualism as a possible answer to the person’s quest for self-realisation. I hate people like this. I hate them with every ounce of my being. What I hate more though, is when these types of people think that their ‘journey’ is so damn important that they have to inflict it on us and tell us their story. You see, because they can help the rest of us be as awesome as them. The problem is, whilst I don’t necessarily harbour any ill will towards someone going on a spiritual journey in order to improve their state of mind and image of self in theory, having to actually hear them tell their story is more often than not an interminable experience. This is because of how self-absorbed the whole damn thing is, not to mention how twee, trite, and simplistic their advice to us (or the lessons they share with us) tend to be. This film version of the Elizabeth Gilbert novel is just like that. A lot of you probably responded to the book and indeed may love the film too, but I am not among you.

 

I loathed the Julia Roberts character in this. The main issue, aside from my general eye-rolling attitude towards such hippy-dippy spiritual enlightenment gobbledy gook is that it really makes the person insufferably self-absorbed. Everything is about her and what she wants, what she needs. Unfortunately, Roberts’ character’s spiritual journey/paid holiday/writing assignment is at the expense of at least two perfectly decent blokes whose lives she could very well have ruined whilst she was having her little holiday. I understand that it might take courage to leave a loveless marriage, but not the way Roberts’ character does in this film. No, she’s just a selfish cow. For starters, she has a good job and great friends to help her through bad times. What is she complaining about? She’s better off than the guys she parts ways with! As presented here, the fall-out from Roberts’ decision to leave her two men (husband Billy Crudup, post-marriage fling James Franco) is barely paid lip service, probably because to place any more emphasis on it would shift audience sympathy in a direction that Murphy (who co-wrote the script), co-writer Jennifer Salt (who starred in Brian De Palma’s “Sisters” back in 1973), and author Gilbert don’t want you heading towards. But even with the manipulative way the story is told, I was still asking questions. Roberts and Crudup blurt out their different expectations of their relationship one night, and then...that’s it, they’re through. Oh well, we want different things so I better leave, then. What? How about discussing things a bit further? No? Why not talk through your marital issues before you get to a point where you want a divorce? If that happened, we were not privy to it. Why not go to marriage counselling for a bit? We don’t understand Roberts’ relationships with Crudup and Franco well enough to know whether she really needed to end those relationships or not. That’s just bad screenwriting. The behaviour by Roberts’ character really doesn’t make much sense. I mean she claims that she doesn’t need men, yet straight after her marriage ends she’s into another relationship, and then when that doesn’t work out, it’s not all that long before she’s in another one. What? Can someone explain that to me? She seems like she keeps going back to the same life she left in the first place, only waking up with a different face next to her. And why on Earth are all the men Roberts gets involved in major hunks like James Franco? And why is he so objectified in this film? Saying that she’s just a female Woody Allen (and indeed many champions of the film will tell you so) is about as good an argument as saying that Fox News is ‘Fair and Balanced’ because it provides a solely Conservative political and cultural viewpoint to make up for the Liberal bias in the rest of the media. Um...no, that just makes them a ‘Fair and Balanced’ Conservative viewpoint. Roberts is merely offering up the same shallow romantic nonsense that Allen (frequently paired with gorgeous young women, often plural) gets into, only with a gender switch.

 

The film’s narrative device (that is, Roberts’ voice-over narration/blog writing) just adds to the self-absorption and self-importance of some ultimately very twee ideas and experiences. It’s just as bad as an episode of “Sex and the City” (Do I even have any female readers left at this point?...Hello?).

 

Reading such material in book form might not be so bad, but seeing it on screen here? Interminable. I know it’s based on a memoir, but not all memoirs have to be entirely self-absorbed like this appears to be. She’s acting like she’s a big freakin’ hero who experiences so many extraordinary things. Nope, you’re just an unhappy chick who decides to be self-indulgent for a while and gets laid a fair bit. There’s a reason why the places Roberts visits all start with ‘I’ (though calling Bali ‘Indonesia’ is perhaps a slight stretch on my part). It’s because it’s all about her. For instance, her passage in Italy sees her trying to get the locals to embrace Thanksgiving. Yes, Julia, everyone wants to be an American and share in your stupid little customs. That’s right, you teach them foreign folk how to talk ‘American’, why don’tcha! Her cultural experiences are entirely self-serving, meaning only to make her feel better about herself. Aw, isn’t that nice, Julia’s giving some money to a poor Balinese woman ‘coz an upper-middle class Yank throwing a bit of money to a 3^rd world nation makes her such a damn hero. Yes, pat yourself on the back there, Julia. You’re not being patronising at all, there. Even her cultural experiences are massively self-absorbed and entirely grossly stereotyped. If she was really looking for spiritual and cultural enlightenment in India and Bali, for instance, she’d actually seek such experiences for a longer period than just a few set weeks, surely. What a cop-out, it just makes her a glorified freaking tourist. And yes, I guess all Eye-talians do eat-a the spaghetti-o, don’t they Julia? Meanwhile, why is eating even important on her quest for self-knowledge and peace? It’s in the title, but what is the spiritual relevance there? The worst bit of self-absorption, though, is when she chats to a young girl in India about to enter an arranged marriage. It serves only to remind her of her own wedding day, revisited in a flashback. Yes, it’s all about you, Julia, it all comes back to you. You’re the Kevin Bacon of the entire freakin’ universe and we all revolve around you. Oh no...poor Julia can’t fit into her jeans because she just ate some cookie crumbs- drama! Sorry, Julia, but you’re not one of us, and we all know you wear skinny jeans, so not fitting into those is not the same thing that most women go through (Not that I’d know anything about women, but you know what I mean). At the end of the day, you go to bed as Julia Roberts, so you are not someone whose worries we can relate to because you are not a regular person.

 

I hated every second of this superficial, self-absorbed piece of crap. I like romantic films, heck I like formula films, but this is a turd. A turd with a very high opinion of itself, but a turd nonetheless. Way too long at over two hours, as well, adding insult to injury. The scenery is nice, Julia at least puts on a somewhat forced smile throughout, which is a lot better than her gloomy, ‘I just smelled a really bad fart’ expression she’s been using for the last fifteen years. Meanwhile, Javier Bardem has a relaxed and likeable presence on screen, but other than that, I loathed this in every possible way.

 

Rating: D