Eat Pray Love

Director: Ryan Murphy
Writers: Ryan Murphy, Jennifer Salt, Elizabeth Gilbert (author)
Starring: Julia Roberts
Release Date: August 13, 2010
Length: 2 hours 14 minutes

Elizabeth Gilbert’s best selling memoirs Eat Pray Love is being brought to screen by director Ryan Murphy (Creator of Glee). Feeling suffocated in her marriage with her husband, Steven (Billy Crudup), journalist Liz files divorce papers and moves on to David (James Franco), a much younger theatre actor, who leads a bohemian lifestyle. Not feeling satisfied yet again, Liz begins to face a mid-life crisis and decides she needs a huge change of life in order find herself. She plans a year-round trip to where she will travel first to Italy, where she will eat and live life like the Italians. Secondly, she will go to India, where she will find her spirituality. Finally, Liz will go to Bali, where she will meet a Brazlian man named Felipe (Javier Bardem). Honestly, I did not hate this film. In fact, I really enjoyed it in parts. The parts I didn’t enjoy were not because they were poorly written, or because the movie was cheesy or because it was just a romantic comedy and nothing else. It wasn’t any of those things at all. The reason for my disappointment was because by the end, when Liz finally had a self-discovery of some sort (whatever it was), I couldn’t relate to her at all. The audience did not know what was this self-discovery and I no longer cared for her character. Despite my lack of knowledge of the book, I can only imagine that her self discovery would have been much more descriptive and intimate in the book, let alone in her thoughts. It’s not the screenwriters, the director or even Julia Roberts fault, but that self discovery definitely did not work on screen, and that’s what most of the film was leading up to. I also didn’t care for it because by the time it happened I’d say more than two hours had passed by and I was tired and bored. So, if we break the film down into three parts (the three places she was in), Italy, India and Bali, I will swear to you that I loved the part of the film when she was in Italy. That was the only part of the film where she really created a group of friends and learned about the culture and lifestyles of Italy, which kept the audience interested. The second part, India was the least entertaining, despite a wonderful performance from Richard Jenkins. The third part, which took place in Bali, was somewhat interesting at the most. Here, my interest was held by her romance with Felipe, but at this point I did not enjoy or appreciate the film as much as I did at the beginning. I cannot judge these events, though because they did occur in Elizabeth Gilbert’s real experience. All I can say is that I’m sure it would have been much more interesting to read the book than see the movie. Moving on, Julia Roberts gave a compelling performance as Liz. She was very humorous and certainly had chemistry with all three of her costars, Billy Crudup, James Franco and Javier Bardem. Bardem actually gave a surprisingly great performance as Felipe. I am not surprised that Bardem performed so well because I know he is an incredible actor, but I thought from what I had seen of the film in the trailers, that his character would be similar to the one he played in Vicky Cristina Barcelona. However, he played a divorced, complicated, funny Brazilian guy who found himself attracted to Julia Roberts’ character as opposed to a gorgeous Brazilian who wisks Liz off her feet immediately. Overall, I would recommend anyone to rent this film on DVD. It wasn’t terrible, but I think you would prefer to watch this in the comfort of your own home, as opposed to being stuck in a theatre for over two hours.