National Post Article: Julia Roberts New Film Is About A Rich, Selfish, & Self Absorbed White Woman Complaining About Her Life.
Eat Pray Love: Julia Roberts is on a mission to find happiness … and stuff her face
Sony
Thin crust pizza. How truly Zen.
Vanessa Farquharson, National Post · Thursday, Aug. 12, 2010
Film Review: Eat Pray Love (2 stars)
The praying part of Eat Pray Love comes first, with Liz (Julia Roberts) deciding to connect with God after years of neglect by kneeling down on her new hardwood floors and informing Him she hates her marriage. Oh, and P.S. Can she please get a sign from above telling her what to do?
But Liz can’t wait longer than a few seconds, it seems, because she immediately gets up, goes back to bed, and informs her husband that she wants a divorce.
It’s an odd beginning in that our heroine is portrayed as rather selfish and callous — her partner Stephen (Billy Crudup), meanwhile, appears perfectly lovely and caring, despite his scatterbrained tendencies and hesitation about going to Aruba. This means that hardly any sympathy is established toward Liz; and sadly, it never materializes.
Sure, a few audience members will be able to relate to feeling caught in a troubled marriage, and yes, we all have fantasies about taking a year off to travel around the world and indulge in “me time” — but not all of us can afford to do so and, even if we could, most wouldn’t be prepared to simply drop everything and leave at the expense of others, be it a life partner or children or even close friends.
But fine. Let’s try to give this woman the benefit of the doubt and hope that whatever life lessons she absorbs by spending time in Italy, India and Bali will be worth it.
The whole concept with Italy is that Liz will eat amazing food and maybe learn a bit of the local language and, well, that’s pretty much it. Granted, the macro shots of frittata, prosciutto with figs, pizza and espresso are mouth-watering, to say the least; however, the messages conveyed from this sojourn (beyond the fact that Italian food is awesome) are a bit pathetic: Yes, Italians use their hands a lot while speaking; fine, maybe Europeans understand fulfillment better than Americans because they have sex more often and don’t drink Miller Light; and everyone rides around on Vespas, and isn’t that cute, and so forth.
One could also just watch David Rocco’s Dolce Vita or any other Italian cooking show on the Food Network.
The next stop is India. Either the cinematographer forgot to bring his macro lens or the food was revolting because there are no victual close-ups here. Instead, the point of this visit isn’t to eat well but to stay at a sparsely furnished ashram and find spiritual meaning through the art of meditation. What happens instead is that Liz argues a lot with a Texan man who nicknames her Groceries, attends an arranged marriage — where she feels pity for the bride but is too distracted by all the pretty colours to do much about it — and purchases a bag full of Ganesh idols, because apparently the path to enlightenment includes a quick bout of consumerism.
India is meant to be the heavier part of the film — the portion devoted to devotion, in which major revelations about the meaning of life occur — and yet the only thing Liz learns is the aphorism “God dwells within you, as you,” which she types into her laptop before petting an elephant and hopping on a plane to her final destination: Bali.
It’s hard to know where to begin with this chapter — there’s a Balinese fortune teller who is made to be endearing by his lack of teeth and constant repetition of the phrase “See you later, alligator,” not to mention speaking about himself in the third person; there are countless tracking shots of Julia Roberts riding a bicycle through idyllic rice paddies; and finally, there’s a new man, Felipe (Javier Bardem), who we know is much better than Stephen because he makes mix tapes and has 46 stamps in his passport and likes to talk about love.
Yes, this might come across as overly harsh and cynical criticism of a film that’s just trying to say something nice about experiencing the real joys of life. But the fact is, Eat Pray Love says absolutely nothing original about food, faith or matters pertaining to the heart. The only enjoyable moment in the film is when James Franco, who plays a terrible actor, stands on a dimly lit stage and utters the line, “Your love is like a hot panini.” That man is hilarious.
Now, technically, it should’ve been a hot panino, but the screenwriters probably weren’t interested in spell-checking their Italian beyond the words spaghetti and pizza. Then again,
Liz spends a fair amount of her time in Italy dwelling on the importance of good diction, attempting to sum herself up in one word, preferably a word that has multiple syllables and sounds nice — like, say, splendiferous. What she comes up with in the final scene, which literally includes riding off into the sunset, albeit on a boat, is something even Oprah Winfrey would roll her eyes at.
But perhaps it’s worth playing this game: trying to come up with a single word that sums up the entirety of Eat Pray Love. Something that is even polysyllabic and sounds nice. This critic’s choice: Platitudinous.
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