text: Film Reviews 
   
   Eat Pray Love -- Film Review 
   
   "Eat Pray Love" 
   
   Bottom Line: A heavily idealized journey of self-discovery with a pretty woman (Julia Roberts), pretty scenery and a pretty shallow view of Eastern spirituality. 
   
   In "Eat Pray Love," Julia Robert's character, Liz Gilbert, takes a holiday from her miserable life as a well-respected, financially secure New York writer, loved by men she cannot love back and despairing of her own inner emptiness. She travels the world to seek enlightenment, a journey -- she never hesitates to tell anyone she meets -- outside her own comfort zone. For the viewer though, it's anything but. The film never ventures, even once, into a situation that does not reek of comfy familiarity.Of course, the Elizabeth Gilbert memoir on which the movie is based also got criticized for its Western fetishization of Eastern thought and the overly self-conscious nature of this journey -- reportedly paid for with a publisher's advance for the book itself. None of that stopped her memoir from becoming a bestseller translated into 40 languages. So with Julia Roberts making one of her increasingly rare starring appearances and the sensual beauty of Italy, India and Indonesia as backdrop for the romanticized navel-gazing, "Eat Pray Love" should attract a substantial female audience, a demographic ill-served by the summer's mostly testosterone-fueled movies.Working from a screenplay he wrote with Jennifer Salt, director Ryan Murphy, the creator of TV series "Nip/Tuck" and "Glee," never loses track of the story's bestseller attributes: foreign landscapes photographed at sunset or sunrise, food displayed with mouth-watering intensity, peripheral characters bursting with vitality, all men unnaturally gorgeous -- or at least interesting -- and female self-discovery as the unwavering central focus.Reeling from a divorce and an affair that didn't do the trick either, Liz tells her best friend and publisher (Viola Davis, not given nearly enough to do) that she intends to chuck everything for a year to research herself in exotic foreign climes. Everyone including her ex (Billy Crudup) and new boy toy (James Franco) pull long faces, but this gal makes a career out of thinking of nobody but herself.Several months are spent in Rome to enjoy food and life (Eat), then off to India for meditation in an ashram (Pray) and finally to Bali, Indonesia, to search for "balance" but finding herself off-balance instead with a Brazilian divorcee (Love).Each segment is thoroughly enjoyable in a touristic sort of way. And Roberts throws herself wholeheartedly into the role of the inner-truth seeker.There, of course, lies the problem. One can line a bookcase with memoirs, novels and DVDs about urban malcontents discovering food and life in Mediterranean climes. At least another bookshelf could be devoted to popular entertainments where Westerners seek spirituality in the East, dating back to Somerset Maugham's "The Razor's Edge" if not the earlier works of Hermann Hesse. Bali is a bit off the beaten path for such self-help entertainments, but after those terrorist bombings the place could use positive publicity.In each segment, Liz is given role models. In Rome, a Scandinavian (Tuva Novotny) and local language coach (the absurdly handsome Luca Argentero) show Liz how to embrace life through cuisine. The girls even nip away to Naples for a pizza sequence! Her Roman lesson: Don't be afraid to attack life.In an unnamed Indian ashram, Richard Jenkins plays a Texan who struggles to forgive himself for his alcoholic past. He mocks and kids Liz to cajole her to do likewise. Then a young girl (Rushita Singh), who dreads her arranged marriage, reminds Liz of her own unarranged marriage and its failure. Her Indian lesson: God dwells within me.In Bali, two healers (Indonesian screen legend Christine Hakim and newcomer Hadi Subiyanto) provide Liz with medicine for her ailing soul. Her Bali lesson: If you're a good girl, you may get Javier Bardem.As Liz literally sails off into a sunset, you imagine that last lesson will be the one that sticks.There is an undeniable attractiveness to all this, however doubtful the self-realization lessons may be. One can imagine whiling away pleasant hours watching this movie again as a late-night DVD or in-flight movie. The charms of each location and the vigor of the film's supporting players cast a romantic glow. No, travel -- and certainly self-realization -- is never quite like this with Robert Richardson's iridescent landscapes and loving portraits of colorful bystanders, the brilliant, exotic sets and costumes by Bill Groom and Michael Dennison and nicely unhurried pace of Bradley Buecker's editing. But it should be. ||||| Food, serenity and kisses  what's not to like? Absolutely nothing, that's what, as millions of readers of Elizabeth Gilbert's phenomenally successful 2006 memoir Eat, Pray, Love will attest. The high-concept structure of Gilbert's confessional story is surely a draw: After a painful divorce, the author ships off on a yearlong international odyssey to pick up the pieces of her shattered self, touching down in Italy to eat, India to pray, and Bali to fall in love. (The love part was not on the author's agenda until the irresistible Brazilian man she calls Felipe in the book, whom she has since married, changed her Indonesian plans.) But what's even more seductive than the exoticism of Gilbert's passport stamps is her ability to describe her moment-to-moment, meal-to-meal feelings with such warm, chatty, deprecating self-awareness that even her episodes of dithering, obsessing, or Where's the rest of me? boo-hooing sound kind of...endearing. On the page, Liz Gilbert comes across as a cool friend, a smart sister, a snappy pal who seems to promise, ''If I can get myself together, so can you.'' And you want to believe her. Or at least you want to chew what she's chewing. 
   
   Eat Pray Love, the movie, directed by Glee co-creator Ryan Murphy, can't muster the sound of Elizabeth Gilbert being Liz. It just can't, no matter how dutifully Murphy and co-screenwriter Jennifer Salt stitch phrases from the page into the screenplay, because the very nature of movies  images come to life, words spoken out loud  is antithetical to Gilbert's distinctive literary style, with words passed privately, silently, between the writer and her reader. 
   
   On the other hand, Eat Pray Love, the movie, has Julia Roberts as Liz Gilbert! Which is a nice choice. If anyone can make chowing down on a plate full of spaghetti look like a joyful, sensual prelude to enlightenment, it's Roberts, who offers herself as Our Julia as generously as Gilbert connects with readers as Our Liz. Roberts' relaxed gracefulness, whether she's spooning gelato, folding her long legs in meditation, or bicycling through the Balinese countryside to study at the feet of a revered medicine man, is the movie's greatest asset. Also, she wears a really pretty dress-like-the-locals wardrobe. Maybe she can travel light because she restocks her suitcase each time her plane lands. 
   
   If only Roberts' warmth, coupled with Javier Bardem's scruffy sexiness as Felipe, were enough to compensate for the folded-map flatness of this production. If only this glossy Eat Pray Love  an armchair journey for these staycation times  didn't amount to a whole lot of navel-gazing about problems that, absent the author's unique narrative language, don't nearly fill up the 133-minute space the movie version allots. A prelude establishes the disintegration of Liz's marriage (to a warring spouse played by Billy Crudup), which falls apart for reasons never satisfactorily explained (in the book, the author didn't even try  the mess just was). Then it's on to Liz's less-than-convincing pre-divorce romance (with James Franco as a  what else?  cute young actor), which disintegrates under similar circumstances of who-knows-what. And then, All aboard!, the movie chugs from country to country, port of enlightenment to port of enlightenment, with a kind of dogged, tour-group energy. Touchdown in each locale is announced via touristic world-music selections; we know, for example, that Liz is about to meet Felipe when the samba music cues up. The director also favors ambiance shots of gesticulating Italians, scrambling street-urchin Indian kids, and gentle farming Indonesians. And he falls for a tacky, chick-flick sequence (or maybe it's a fat-free-yogurt commercial) in which Liz and a new European girlfriend, bound by a vow to forget calorie counts and love carbs, try to zip up new jeans. 
   
   Under the circumstances, Roberts' scenes with Six Feet Under's (yet again) great Richard Jenkins as a fellow meditation student at her Indian ashram are almost jarring in the passionate naturalism Jenkins brings to the role  a passion that brings out Roberts' best work here. Where Felipe and the rest of the folks Liz meets are types  the handsome Italian teacher, the unhappily betrothed Indian girl, the toothless Indonesian guru  Jenkins turns Richard From Texas into a specific soul in search of redemption. Even spouting guru-type aphorisms such as ''You want to get to the castle, you've got to swim the moat'' (huh?), he's a man worth circling the globe to spend time with. The rest of the passengers? After you land, you won't keep in touch. C+ 
   
   See all of this week's reviews
target: – Eat, Pray, Love looks lovely but lacks both the spice and the depth of the best-selling memoir it's based on, say critics. Julia Roberts stars as a jaded New York divorcee traveling the world to seek enlightenment. Roberts' Liz says she wants to move outside her comfort zone, writes Kirk Honeycutt at the Hollywood Reporter, but as she journeys through Italy, India, and Indonesia, "the film never ventures, even once, into a situation that does not reek of comfy familiarity." The movie "is shameless wish-fulfillment, a Harlequin novel crossed with a mystic travelogue," complains Roger Ebert at the Chicago Sun-Times, though he notes that the overwhelmingly female audience he watched it with appeared quite moved. Roberts manages to make the "2 hours and 15 minutes of eating, praying and loving pleasant enough," writes Roger Moore at the Orlando Sentinel, who decides Eat, Pray, Love "isn’t a bad movie, just a spiritually dead one." Roberts is a great choice to play Liz but "her warmth, coupled with Javier Bardem's scruffy sexiness" as love interest Felipe, aren't enough to compensate for "the folded-map flatness of this production," writes Lisa Schwarzbaum at Entertainment Weekly.