Skip to main contentIt wasn't screened for critics by WW press deadlines. Then the reviewer went on vacation. (Really.) To a place without wi-fi. (Central Florida.) He had to post this from a McDonald's. (Only place in town with Internet access after 5 pm.) Then he ate a Quarter Pounder, but did not pray or love.
Eat Pray Love
WW Critic's Score: 32
Elizabeth Gilbert's trip to Rome, Mumbai and Bali to write her memoir Eat, Pray, Love—a journey of self-discovery which she funded by discovering a sizable advance, and could somebody get me the number of her agent?—lasted one year. Even without having read the book, I could have estimated the duration of her holiday, since the movie version of her peripatetic epiphany lasts approximately two years.
I don't begrudge Gilbert her vacation. I'm on one of my own, which is why this review is four days late. But Eat Pray Love (commas lost like luggage) is stupefying long and remorselessly devoid of incident. As the one-hour mark passed, I was dismayed to realize that we had only made it through the "Eat" segment of the triptych, and still had "Pray" and "Love" to go. Gilbert—played by a frowny Julia Roberts—does not seem overburdened by labor, but wherever she travels, people encourage her to do even less. Here's a title for you: Call it The Year of Living Languorously.
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As directed by Glee creator Ryan Murphy, Eat Pray Love has a brittle sheen of the sardonic, but inside is a chewy candy heart of molten self-pity. Our heroine Liz, who I'm going to trust is not actually a bad person but merely explains herself poorly, defaults on her marriage because her husband wants to teach poor children and she wants to go to Tahiti. I realize it sounds like I'm being unfair to her, but these are the reasons offered. By the end of the film, when she notices that her Southeast Asian medicine woman is basically destitute, she takes up a collection among her friends and smugly declares, "Sometimes when you set out to help yourself, you end up helping everyone." Who is she: the Ayn Rand of cultural tourism?
Most of the actors she encounters en route are good enough. Viola Davis and Mike O'Malley (the dad of the gay kid on Glee) are appropriately skeptical as Gilbert's New York pals, and their doubts ground the earliest scenes. Richard Jenkins, playing an ashram mentor, is his usual unassuming self, though I would have traded the whole of his advice here for the 30 seconds of Step Brothers where he explains how he wanted to be a dinosaur. James Franco gives one of his worst performances—but it's hard to fault him for giving this material less attention than his four graduate programs. Better is Javier Bardem as an emotionally available Brazilian; best is Billy Crudup as the dropped husband (not coincidentally, he is the only person who tells the heroine she might be a less than ideal specimen of humanity). As for Roberts, she's miscast. It's not really a problem that she's a decade too old for the role, but she's also too amiable and carefree; someone more abrasive and striving, like Elizabeth Banks, might have been better primed for spiritual growth. But that would have required the character to develop.
As Eat Pray Love grosses its inevitable millions, the critical debate has been over what it says about American women: Is hatred or indifference toward this movie (and the similar, if crasser, Sex and the City 2) a sign that we still can't accept female characters moving through the world with the same autonomy as men? But this way of framing the conversation is patronizing—it assumes that Elizabeth Gilbert is defined by her gender. She isn't. Elizabeth Gilbert is defined by her money. She jets across the globe with the blithe confidence of the very wealthy, while we are supposed to be enraptured by her spending and attendant fulfillment. Going to the movies to watch the idle rich is a tradition dating back to the last economic depression, but movies like The Palm Beach Story implicitly critiqued the idleness. Now they want us to cheer and sigh every time they grow even idler? Here's a title for you: Eat shit, die. PG-13.
Opened Friday at Century 16 Cedar Hills Crossing, Century at Clackamas Town Center, Century Eastport 16, Cinema 99 Stadium 11, Cinemas Bridgeport Village Stadium 18&IMAX, Cinetopia, City Center Stadium 12, Cornelius 9 Cinemas, Division Street Stadium 13, Evergreen Parkway Stadium 13, Hilltop 9 Cinema, Lloyd Center Stadium 10 Cinema, Lloyd Mall 8 Cinema, Moreland Theatre, Movies On TV Stadium 16, Pioneer Place Stadium 6, Roseway Theatre, Sandy Cinemas, Sherwood Stadium 10, Tigard 11 Cinemas, Wilsonville Stadium 9 Cinema.
WWeek 2015