Eat, Pray Love is a visually stunning movie, and I’m not just talking about Javier Bardem, James Franco or Julia Roberts’s flawless skin. The locations are gorgeous to start with and the filmmakers managed to make them even more appealing by doing their jobs so well.
At least, the visual part is stunning.
I have to tell you right now that despite the envy-inspiring locations and the A-list cast, I was ultimately disappointed in the movie since, you guessed it, I read the book. It’s a tale of woe shared by book readers/movie viewers since the first time a book was ever made into a movie, and I won’t be the last to say it: they changed things from the book that I thought were critical to the telling of the story. But it wasn’t my story to tell, and there you have it.
This is my story to tell, and I’ll tell you what I think they shouldn’t have changed.
The book has been criticized (and now the film will be as well) for being a boring story of one woman’s navel-gazing. In my opinion, anyone who says that has either never admitted to having had a spiritual crisis or never got out of theirs. Because we all have them, at least pretty much everyone I’ve ever met has. And Elizabeth Gilbert, the author of the book and the protagonist of the story, had her crisis in the midst of what most people would call a perfect life.
For many, it’s hard to understand her dissatisfaction because they would envy her circumstances, and unfortunately, the movie will not help solve that problem: everything in Julia’s Robert’s fictionalized New York life is fantastic, at least from the outside, including her job as a writer, her husband Billy Crudup and her Rebound Boyfriend, James Franco. (The casting is quite delicious all around.)
The point is, what can seem like a palace to onlookers may be a prison to the person living in it. It’s all a choice, and since this is a free country, no one can make you love your life, no matter how great it is or it seems to be.
So, Elizabeth Gilbert had a spiritual crisis, got a book deal, and traveled the world to write the book and heal her spirit, which she managed to do fairly well, eating her way though Rome, meeting my all-time favorite character in non-fiction, Richard From Texas (so well played by Richard Jenkins in the film), and falling in love with the man of her dreams in possibly the most beautiful place on earth, Bali. 
Now, on the surface, this is fluff and not really that interesting as a life-lesson-self-help sort of tale, since I am not about to 1) get a book deal, or 2) jet off around the world for a year. And neither is most of the reading public, which is why I think most people dislike the book. 
But the movie skips over something seriously important: Elizabeth Gilbert had a spiritual awakening that she wrote about in her book. She actually finds God, and she gets through her crisis and figures out her life. That’s kind of a major point, which the movie kind of fuzzes over.
The implication in the movie is that meeting the Javier Bardem character is what changes her life, and he’s so dreamy/sexy that it’s easy to imagine that might actually be true. But it makes the movie much less interesting and the bulls-eye for the critics much larger.
The truth is you can have a spiritual awakening in Van Nuys; you don’t have to fly to India or Bali, and Gilbert has said as much herself. This happens to have been her story, one that resonated particularly with me.
And so while this movie may not help you have a spiritual awakening, it will certainly delight your senses, and that is not a disappointment.
{I attended the screening of this film as a guest of Sony Pictures.}
but nothing beats having your name (spelled correctly) on a piece of paper held by the limo driver.
