Eat Pray Love.movie

[Jacquelyne Betance]

ElizabethLiz' Gilbert has been married for 8 years, owns a house, and has a successful career. However, despite her seemingly stable life, she feels lost and confused, longing for something more meaningful. Liz decides to ask for a divorce from her husband, Stephen, which he struggles to accept. During this period, she has a brief affair with David, a young actor. Newly divorced and facing uncertainty, Liz embarks on a transformative journey to Italy, India, and Bali, seeking self-discovery.

During her travels, Liz discovers the joy of Italian cuisine, indulging in pasta and gelato for four months. She meets a new Swedish friend who introduces her to a private Italian tutor, and they share a Thanksgiving celebration before Liz heads to India. In India, Liz stays at an ashram where she delves into the power of prayer and is tasked with humbling chores like scrubbing floors. 'Texas Richard' becomes both a challenge and a support system for her. As her time at the ashram comes to an end, Liz moves on to Bali, Indonesia.

In Bali, Indonesia, Liz reunited with Ketut, a local healer, and takes on various tasks he assigns her. While cycling, she has a run-in with Felipe, a Brazilian, and seeks treatment for an injury from Wayan, a village healer. During her recovery, she meets Armenia, who encourages her to join in village festivities. There, Felipe apologizes for the accident, and they strike up a conversation. Despite Armenia's attempt to set her up with someone else, Liz finds herself drawn to Felipe. They spend time together, and Liz organizes a fundraiser for Wayan's house, raising over $18,000 USD.

When Felipe proposes, Liz agrees, but as they spend time alone in a remote location, she becomes overwhelmed and breaks off the engagement. As she prepares to leave Bali, Liz seeks advice from Ketut, who urges her to embrace love without fear. Inspired, Liz rushes to Felipe and confesses her love for him, finally finding inner peace and the balance of true love unexpectedly.

Hindu leaders voiced concern over the production of the film and advocated the use of spiritual consultants to ensure that the film conveyed an accurate reflection of life in an ashram.[4][5] Both Salon.com and The New York Post have suggested that Gurumayi Chidvilasananda was the guru featured in the film and in the book by Elizabeth Gilbert on which the film was based, though Gilbert herself did not identify the ashram or the guru by name.[6] The two Balinese lead characters (Ketut Liyer and Wayan) are played by Indonesian actors Hadi Subiyanto and Christine Hakim, respectively.

On Rotten Tomatoes, the film has a 36% approval rating based on 210 reviews with an average rating of 5.20/10. The site's critical consensus reads "The scenery is nice to look at, and Julia Roberts is as luminous as ever, but without the spiritual and emotional weight of the book that inspired it, Eat Pray Love is too shallow to resonate."[11] On Metacritic, it has a score of 50 based on reviews from 39 critics, indicating "mixed or average reviews".[12] Audiences surveyed by CinemaScore gave the film a grade B on scale of A to F.[13]

Peter Bradshaw of The Guardian gave the film 1 out of 5 stars, beginning his review "Sit, watch, groan. Yawn, fidget, stretch. Eat Snickers, pray for end of dire film about Julia Roberts's emotional growth, love the fact it can't last for ever. Wince, daydream, frown. Resent script, resent acting, resent dinky tripartite structure. Grit teeth, clench fists, focus on plot. Troubled traveller Julia finds fulfilment through exotic foreign cuisine, exotic foreign religion, sex with exotic foreign Javier Bardem. Film patronises Italians, Indians, Indonesians. Julia finds spirituality, rejects rat race, gives Balinese therapist 16 grand to buy house. Balinese therapist is grateful, thankful, humble. Sigh, blink, sniff. Check watch, groan, slump."[14]

Wesley Morris of The Boston Globe gave the film 3 out of 4 stars while writing "Is it a romantic comedy? Is it a chick flick? This is silly, since, in truth, it's neither. It's simply a Julia Roberts movie, often a lovely one."[15] San Francisco Chronicle film critic Mick LaSalle overall positively reviewed the film and praised Murphy's "sensitive and tasteful direction" as it "finds way to illuminate and amplify Gilbert's thoughts and emotions, which are central to the story".[16]

Negative reviews appeared in The Chicago Reader, in which Andrea Gronvall commented that the film is "ass-numbingly wrong",[17] and Rolling Stone, in which Peter Travers referred to watching it as "being trapped with a person of privilege who won't stop with the whine whine whine."[18] Humor website Something Awful ran a scathing review. Martin R. "Vargo" Schneider highlighted several aspects of the film that he considered completely unrealistic.[19] Political columnist Maureen Dowd termed the film "navel-gazing drivel" in October 2010.[20]

The BBC's Mark Kermode listed the film as 4th on his list of Worst Films of the Year, saying: "Eat Pray Love... vomit. A film with the message that learning to love yourself is the greatest love of all, although I think the people who made that film loved themselves rather too much."[21]

Eat Pray Love is ultimately charming and inspirational. Though it doesn't have quite the impact of the book, it will likely leave you pondering your life choices and forgiving your flaws. It will certainly have you forgiving the few flaws in the film. The performances are just too fantastic, the vistas too lovely to pay too much attention to anything else.[22]

How many platitudes fit in a two-hour-twenty-minutes-long movie? Several, if Eat Pray Love is anything to go by. Sure, if TV director Ryan Murphy's directing weren't so slow, even more would. For example, in the long part shot in Rome, the mandolin is conspicuously absent. There's a shower of spaghetti, Italians who gesticulate all the time and shout vulgarities as they follow foreign girls around. [...] There's lots of pizza. But no mandolin. Why? [...] Goes without saying that the story would've surprised us more if Julia had found out how well one can eat in Mumbai, how much they pray in Indonesia, and how one can fall in love even in the Grande Raccordo Anulare, possibly avoiding rush hour.[23]

Marketers for the film created over 400 merchandising tie-ins.[27] Products included Eat Pray Love-themed jewelry,[28] perfume,[28] tea,[28] gelato machines,[27] an oversized Indonesian bench,[29] prayer beads, and a bamboo window shade.[30] World Market department store opened an entire section in all of their locations devoted to merchandise tied to the movie.[29]

The Home Shopping Network ran 72 straight hours of programming featuring Eat Pray Love products around the time of the film's release.[27] The decision to market such a wide range of products, hardly any of which were actually featured in the film, brought criticism from The Philadelphia Inquirer,[27] The Washington Post and The Huffington Post.[31]

Just as the book turned out to be a perfect vehicle for Gilbert to work through all manner of emotional highs and lows, the movie creates space and a place for Roberts to give into wave after wave of feelings as she moves through resentment, guilt, regret, forgiveness, joy and hope to change her life.

The film basically begins where the book does with Liz Gilbert at 30, a successful writer with a handsome underachieving husband in Stephen (Crudup), a house in a posh New York suburb, on her knees in the middle of the night sobbing a prayer to God to fix what is broken.

Eat, Pray, Love is structured in three parts, each relating to a different geographical location and her experiences there. The title of the book suggests that she ate in Italy, prayed in India and loved in Indonesia, and while she certainly seemed to concentrate on these specific activities in those countries, the most common theme to transcend those barriers is the idea of love. While the travelling aspect of her adventure, as well as the spiritual and emotional growth she experienced is documented chronologically, there is a lot of jumping around in time and space which I find useful in a memoir. We are obviously aware that Liz is writing this book in hindsight, but she makes every attempt at making us feel present to each event as it unfolds. However, this approach can be off-putting at times, especially when attempting to make us feel sympathy for events we know will soon be rectified.

I know a lot of people really connected with this book in a way that made it sound like more of a self-help book as opposed to a memoir, but aside from the impression it left on me about the power of travel and positivity, I found myself rolling my eyes a lot at the idea of using her methods to improve my life. At one point, Liz expounded on a problem for pages and pages and pages only to have it disappear completely from her life after one hour of meditation. Her inner journey is simplified to make for better reading and it results in a frustrating experience for me personally as a reader, but I am sure some of my more enlightened friends would read of a transcendental experience in a significantly less cynical view than mine. I do not believe Liz was writing any of this book advocating for others to do the same, on the contrary, many times she stated clearly that this is her own personal journey based on methods and techniques of healing which worked for her alone. But I know many people feel that Eat, Pray, Love can be read as a guide for self-improvement.

Elizabeth Gilbert's book "Eat, Pray, Love," unread by me, spent 150 weeks on the New York Times best seller list and is by some accounts a good one. It is also movie material, concerning as it does a tall blond (Gilbert) who ditches a failing marriage and a disastrous love affair to spend a year living in Italy, India and Bali seeking to find the balance of body, mind and spirit.

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