The Woman Within

Some people say what matters most isn’t the destination but the journey, while others say the exact opposite is true.

Ryan Murphy’s Eat Pray Love – starring Julia Roberts, a.k.a. Hollywood’s last true movie star (right?) – says both are important...especially when you get to indulge in some pasta; find your center, if not yourself, at the source of all that is; and fall in love in paradise.

Eat Pray Love, a “big, juicy movie” by all expectations, telegraph-tells the story of Liz Gilbert, a thriving writer-eventually-turned-Oprah-approved-literary-sensation.

Before she became an Official Book Club Selection, though, Liz was just another New York City career-woman succeeding in some areas of her life but not in others – and as the movie begins (well, after a 20-minute-or-so prologue), a divorcée embarking on a year-long journey that takes her to Italy, India, and Bali to essentially find herself. The woman who would be....

The movie, with its built-in audience of eaters, prayers, and lovers, is going to be a hit.

That Roberts – luminous, wonderful, Oscar-winning Roberts – stars in it is just the parmesan on top of the spaguetti, the enlightenment at the end of the meditation, the sun-drenched kiss at the end of the courtship. I say this because, as a movie this adaptation doesn’t succeed.

Not completely...not the way it could have, and certainly not the way fans such as myself would want for Roberts.

I never read the book upon which the movie is based, and a couple of friends who did totally didn’t endorse that I do, so I can only judge what I saw on the big screen, which was entertaining, but not at all... that profound.

Why did Liz turn around one night and told her husband (Billy Crudup) – whom we were asked to assume was a bit of a what, a nitwit? a flake? – that she didn’t want to be married anymore? Why was she so quick to sour on her rebound romance with a younger guy (James Franco)? And who paid for her trip, anyway?

These are details that were brushed over at best and ignored at worst. I can appreciate that Eat Pray Love, and Murphy, for that matter, has great aspirations, but it is hindered by them as well, by this need to put Roberts and us there, where it all happened for Gilbert. But then it kinda just leaves us there...to assign motivation to action.

The movie eats a bit more than it probably should, cannot bring us inward with Roberts as she prays, and almost kinda sorta rushes into love without offering anything in the way of an epilogue. It wants to be a motivational example for the women who devoured Gilbert’s story, a girl-power manifest gorgeously photographed for silver-screen consumption. It, however, ends up being a subpar one; scenic as can be, but ultimately unsatisfying.

Take the Eat portion of it, for instance. It’s much too long when you consider that, perhaps, the Love part would be more significant because that’s when Liz meets Felipe (Javier Bardem, playing the man who would become her second husband, I believe) and he journey begins (to end? to really begin?). The Pray section, a transitional stage, provides the most insight (by virtue of our heroine learning to talk her quest out), and, to boot, a tremendous turn by Richard Jenkins as Richard from Texas, a man who helps Liz understand the importance of what she’s doing.

Roberts is accessible as ever in the role of a woman lost, eagerly looking for herself. She is the reason, the real reason, this will be the blockbuster she needs it to be (Duplicity disappointed; Valentine’s Day was not hers to brag about at the end of the day). As much as an anchor as she is, though, she is weighed down by the uneveness of the product that Murphy has delivered.

While the movie may not be a winner, Murphy shouldn’t feel discouraged: I understand the book wasn’t all that, anyway. And like I said, this one, much like the woman who inspired it, is gonna do just fine.

My Rating **1/2

Photo: Sony Pictures.