Eat Pray Love

Eat Pray Love

This is a contemplative story, a narration, a memoir, and a travel-as-discovery story.
I read the book a while ago, on my sister’s unerring recommendation. (Jan, you should start a blog and review/recommend books. You’re batting 1000 for me.)
A woman in her thirties discovers she is married for all the wrong reasons. Traditionally they are the right reasons, but not working for her. She decides to end the childless relationship, falls into the arms of an actor as she rebounds, becomes disillusioned, realizes she is at war with herself, and decides to take a break for a year. She will go to Rome, to learn the language, which she loves, and abuse the food, which she craves, then to India to study at the Ashram of her actor’s Guru, then to Bali, because a medicine man there told her she would return. That’s pretty much the plot.
The book is superlative. It works because Liz, the narrator, is a gifted and sensitive—and honest—writer. Translating such a thing onto film would be a challenge for anyone, and the director succeeds as well as anyone else might have.
Julia Roberts plays Liz. Everyone else in the movie is a supporting role—she is the only A-list name.
Liz’s dilemma, it seems to me, is universal—that is, we never know for sure if what we are thinking and feeling is real or counterfeit, and consequently, if the decisions we make regarding those thoughts and feelings, are the right ones. Or the best ones, or at least the most necessary ones.
She does seem to learn from the experiences her travels offer her, and discovers facets of life not previously examined, in the lives of the people she meets and befriends on the journey. In that sense, it is a positive story, but one which falls short of any objective conclusions, which is true for all of us.
Most of us have the sense that—and I have written about it often—books are superior to movies as vehicles for storytelling. (Unless the story is so simple, shallow and/or universal that a book is not really necessary. Think Star Wars.) Those of us who read a lot, and consequently are often seeing the movie after the fact, often bemoan the fact that too much was left out; what about this scene; you can’t really understand without the pages of narrative or thought going on in the protagonists head, etc. And this is usually true. But with this one, I found a rare instance where, for me, the opposite turned out to be true.
There is a scene, in India, where a fellow traveler, a man from Texas, reveals a painful, life-altering, gut-wrenching truth to Liz, because in order to grow, she needs to hear it. As the story unfolds they are sitting on a roof at the Ashram. It is emotionally very powerful. I remember the scene very well in the book, and found it to be both poignant, and profound. But in the movie, it becomes transcendent. It is the force, and talent, and overwhelming honesty of the two actors which renders it so potent. To see it being delivered, and accepted, in this case, was superior to reading it and imagining it. Richard Jenkins (you would recognize him) plays the Texan. It is one of the best jobs of acting I have ever seen.
And it made me realize something I had not really thought of before. When someone is the focus of a scene—delivering the soliloquy, telling the story, involved in the action, we tend to forget about the other people. But without saying a word, Julia Roberts not only holds her own in the scene, she makes it work. My little mini-epiphany is that the watcher, the listener, the responder, is just as important to a scene like this as the active one, on whom the scene focuses. If I were teaching film, this is the one I would use to illustrate that idea. Watch Casablanca again, the last scene, at the airport. Listen to Rick as he tells Ilsa why he can’t go with her, but watch Bergman as Bogart is speaking. That’s what I’m talking about.
With Eat Pray Love, Nita and I both bemoaned the fact that much had to be left out. A film like this could be nit-picked and second-guessed to death. Yes, it is sparse in some places. Yes, it is a little flat here and there, as if the director did not want to get too close, too intimate. It is a quiet, deliberately-paced film, without any big action. Not one explosion, if I remember correctly. But overall, it works very well, and we both recommend it.
It is rated PG-13. There is no sex, or skin in the movie (and there is in the book—handled well, I thought) and very few instances of profanity. Maybe 3. I’m not sure anyone will have any kind of eureka moment as a result of watching this one, but no one will leave having lost precious brain cells—which is not true of a lot of movies.