In a tidy summary….eat, pray, love and make sure you bring along a ribbon to tie it up into one big carbohydrate bow (she eats a lot of pasta in Italy.) Liz Gilbert (Julia Roberts) is a journalist who is bored with her pastry-chef husband, Stephen (Billy Crudup) and decides to just up and leave the life she’s responsible for creating…. in order to create a new one, of course. But before she drops everything – this is easy to do as she’s a freelance writer sans kids, cat or dog – she will have a fling with a yogi from Yonkers named David (James Franco.) Okay, now we hate her! Actually… we love her. The Julia Roberts we used to know and love is back – older and wiser. Think of this as her Diane-Lane-Under-the-Tuscan-Sun-woman-on-a-mission-to-find-herself. But Roberts sleeps with James Franco. I said that already. On her mission, Roberts takes off and first ends up in Italy (where she eats carbs instead of salad) and then to India (where she attends the arranged marriage of a seventeen year old girl who feels her life is really over), and finally to Bali where she sleeps with Felipe (Javier Bardem). Okay, now we really hate her. The international best selling book of which this film was based took a lot of backlash from women complaining that the real life Elizabeth Gilbert didn’t know real problems: Cancer, death, tragedy, being poor, struggling, etc. And yes, while that may be true, the bigger problem is that as American women we tend to be judgmental, incapable of enjoying the moment, in denial that life could be something other than what we’re raised to believe it is. And we don’t need Biblical tragedies to take some time out for us. We’re always worried about everyone else and moving onto the next thing. And that’s what this movie wants to teach us. To stay in the moment. The power of now. Like that book. In the end, the film’s real fault is that the main character doesn’t come with any real challenges, few obstacles, and no need to call home and check on the kids. We should all be so lucky. The stories backdrop is rich with visual landscape – Italy – how perfect, and not enough of the rich insides that make Robert’s character Liz internally tick. Two tiaras
