Eat Pray Love movie review: don’t eat beforehand
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If your girlfriend, your boyfriend, your mother, grandmother, father, grandfather, friend, colleague or Facebook stalker convinces you to accompany them to a screening of Eat Pray Love, my immediate advice – conferred in the spirit of harm minimisation – is to wait until after the movie to eat.
For this I have two reasons: 1) because director Ryan Murphy shoots mouth salivating Italian dishes through the sort of rosy romantic lens that would have turned star Julia Roberts green with jealousy and driven her to holler something along the lines of “that meatball will never work in this town again!” were she not the owner of the mouth to which said meatball was deposited and 2) because this syrupy sweet cinematic soufflé is so syrupy sweet it will likely turn the stomachs of anybody who doesn’t have a particular fondness for syrupy sweet cinematic soufflés. And it isn’t just the sweetness: Eat Pray Love is also deep fried in the sort of flasher-with-a-trenchcoat obviousness for which Hollywood is widely known and criticised.
Bookended by silly scenes in which the protagonist seeks counsel from a toothless smiling oracle, the story follows Liz (Roberts) as she fumbles her way through a pre-mid-life mid-life crisis. She drops her husband Stephen (Billy Crudup) like a sack of potatoes and persues a two point plan: hook up with other men and eat nice food.
Allure, fate and the path outlined by author Elizabeth Gilbert on whose book the film is based lead Liz to Italy, India and finally Bali, where she jumps under the bed sheets with Javier Bardem and discovers the true meaning of (*cringe*) the last word of the title. If you thought those three words might be subtly interwoven into a fusion of the protag’s experiences, think again. Italy signifies “eat,” India signifies “pray” and Bali – no prizes for guessing.
The character development is so poor that the first pivotal moment in Liz’s journey – the early trigger that literally gets her off the bedroom floor and into divorce court – feels implausibly casual. It plays as if she went for a walk happily married and came back single with a loaf of bread and, all of a sudden, apparently, an aching chasm in her soul.
That moment sets a bad precedent for the rest of the narrative and the supporting characters, particularly the man meat (Crudup, Bardem and James Franco) for whom Roberts’ wide red lips are directed. Eat Pray Love is the sort of chick flick which manages to offend both genders: the women are like chalk outlines in search of a man to fill them and the men are like hunks of dead meat strung up and skewered by their lovers in an abattoir comprised of the cinematic equivalent of Mills and Boon romanticism.
If that sounds tasty, then tuck in.
Eat Pray Love’s Australian theatrical release date: October 7, 2010.
see it
skip it
don't rush
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I liked David Stratton’s comment that she visits Italy, India and Indonesia, which all begin with the letter ‘I’, which is apt since she is the most selfish person imaginable
Peter Bradshaw called it: ‘eat your fist, pray for it to end, love it when it does.’
i note that Margaret Pomerantz and David Stratton actually agreed (possibly a first) that it was rubbish
you are a brave man, Monsieur Buckmaster, – this film has been glowingly received by all my female friends.
I thought the book so-so, and the film – well I think you got it right there.
It is interesting that so many people are seeing this film at charity events (I saw it at a “Fitted for Work” benefit, but other random benefits are running around town). Is this unusual?
Surely no-one was expecting a cinematic masterpiece – but what’s all this vitriol really about? Consider a male protagonist who has everything he’s supposed to want (money, nice house, beautiful wife etc); he questions the ‘meaning’ of it all, has some sort of cathartic crisis, then perhaps has an ill-considered and inappropriate liaison or two with (this being a movie) some appropriately hot chicks, learns some hard lessons and then in the final reel he finds peace with his humbler, older and wiser self in a nicely-shot location – maybe accessorised by an attractive female soul-mate, or perhaps a sailboat. Maybe it stars Kevin Costner. Maybe Margaret finds it moving, and maybe David thinks its overly-schmaltzy crap, but no-one’s undies are in a knot over it. But stick a female protagonist in there and you’ve got bile gushing everywhere (almost literally – most reviews of this film make some sort of joke about nausea and vomiting. I guess it was too hard to resist).
Nasty Julia ‘drops her husband like a sack of potatoes and pursues a two point plan: hook up with other men and eat nice food’ – making her ‘the most selfish person imaginable’, apparently. How dare she! Perhaps she should have done something more meaningful, like salivate over a piece of hot teenage arse like Kevin Spacey’s character in American Beauty. Or perhaps she should have stayed with her nice husband, had babies and drowned her disappointment and frustrations in beer like… well, like a lot of real people but not like any no male protagonist in any film I can think of at this moment.
So while the movie wasn’t very interesting, the lessons we can draw from the surrounding commentary are interesting indeed: Men’s mid-life crises are profound; women’s are silly. Male characters experiencing said crisis are flawed, yet compelling anti-heroes; women in crisis are whiny, narcissistic and shallow. Men who indulge in inappropriate or intemperate behaviour in the course of resolving this crisis are either amusing or tragic; women who eat, drink and f*ck their way through it are greedy, selfish sluts.
Wow, ‘based on the incredible true story’ of someone who went travelling. The trailer looks terrible. Thanks for the heads up.
I saw the movie last week. I liked because I really thought it was a good insight into middle class new age sensibalties that people will be drawn too when something is bugging them or goes wrong in their life. In fact I have seen this reaction to these sort of delimas coming from both male and female more times than not. I thought the characters were fairly well spot on all obsessed with their own world that they had created for themselves but wanting someone or something to share it with. When that someone or something left them or it was not working out the way it should they became sad and delt with the feeling the best way they new how. I hope their Island worked out and they did not catch malaria because then you have a real hassle on your hands that you can’t run away from easily.
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