Eat.pray Love Movie

[Tamar Navratil]

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]

I still like Julia Roberts, and I'm not sorry that Eat Pray Love made a lot of money this weekend, because as I said Friday, the round of stories about whether she's washed up had gotten a little old.

But wow, that movie is really, really not good. For a movie made from an adored book, it's a startlingly weak film. And what's odd is how specific and simple the reasons are for its not being good -- and for the fact that people who read the book and loved it probably will love the movie, too.

It's much too long. First things first: two hours and 20 minutes is simply far too long for this story. By the time Elizabeth Gilbert -- or, rather, the person I will call "Movie Liz," to distinguish her from both Book Liz and actual Elizabeth Gilbert in real life -- finishes up in Italy, the thought that there are two entire countries left for her to visit is like realizing at the close of a one-hour doctor's appointment that the doctor has only looked in one ear. Fewer shots of pasta would have been a good place to start.

Inadequate attention is given to establishing the reason for the trip. Full disclosure: I'm only about a quarter of the way through the book at this point, but from only one quarter of the book, I already understand why Book Liz went on this journey. Book Liz had an unhappy marriage to an often unkind person, followed unsuccessful efforts to get pregnant with the painful realization that she didn't want to get pregnant, got a divorce, and then had her heart ripped out by a broken relationship with another guy she really loved. She went through depression, medication for depression, and lots more before deciding on her year-long international trip.

Movie Liz, on the other hand, wakes up one night unhappy in her marriage and dumps her apparently sweet and loving, if somewhat flaky, husband. She then uses a hot young guy who's unlucky enough to be actually in love with her to get over her divorce, and then, for no particular reason, she dumps him, too. And then: Off to Italy!

My own parents have a small farm, and my sister and I grew up working. We were taught to be dependable, responsible, the top of our classes at school, the most organized and efficient babysitters in town, the very miniature models of our hardworking farmer/nurse of a mother, a pair of junior Swiss Army knives, born to multitask. We had a lot of enjoyment in my family, a lot of laughter, but the walls were papered with to-do lists and I never experienced or witnessed idleness, not once in my whole entire life.

This is critical information. That Book Liz has never known idleness, that she was raised working on a farm in addition to babysitting, helps the reader understand why she needs to pause for breath. Without this background, her quest to do nothing seems simply to be born of a desire to spoil herself and eat.

It's possible that the people who made the movie were afraid that the book deal would make the trip seem crass; less like an inspired journey and more like work. But to me, the fact that she was writing a book makes it less like obsessive, self-interested navel-gazing, because she intended all along to share the story with other people. And that's not to mention the fact that it helps people understand how anyone affords to go off for a year to eat pasta and meditate without simply being a self-indulgent rich person.

3a8082e126