Eat Pray Love (2010)

Whenever a book is a bestseller and made into a highly-promoted film with months of advanced promotion and numerous television and radio interviews with the book's author and starring celebrity actress, I want to not like the movie. I resisted this book initially because of it's book club popularity, but my sister gave it to me for Christmas a few years ago and I completely enjoyed reading it.

One Woman's Search for Everything Across Italy, India and Indonesia states the cover page inside Eat Pray Love. This book is not the "chick lit" I expected. I went on to read Elizabeth Gilbert's earlier book The Last American Man. I later picked up and the one that came after the success of EPL--a deep look into relationship and marriage--Committed. She is a researcher who tells the truth of a story with many interesting side stories, quotes, and facts. I find her writing to be quite engaging.

Ryan Murphy (Glee, Nip Tuck, Running With Scissors) wrote the screenplay adaptation and directed the film. Brad Pitt is listed as a producer. The opening day audience at the North Park Theater was largely groups of women. This may be the "chick flick" of the summer season, but a few men will also enjoy Gilbert's world of discovery through picturesque travel through three countries. The story opens with a quote from the book that ponders Virginia Woolf...

"Across the broad continent of a women's life falls the shadow of a sword. On one side there lies convention and tradition and order where all is correct. But on the other side of that sword, if you're crazy enough to cross it and choose a life that does not follow conventions all is confusion. Nothing follows a regular course."

The story takes us along with Liz Gilbert (Julia Roberts) as she crosses that shadow. Plagued with the feeling that she no longer wishes to have children. She no longer wishes to be married to nice guy husband, Stephen (Billy Crudup). She wants to travel--he does not. She no longer wants to live in the big, lonely dream house. This is her painful truth. Despite commitments and vows, Liz walks away to find herself, but first she crosses paths with a new man, David (James Franco). The actor/yogi becomes the catalyst for her spiritual awakening.

Liz Gilbert loves men of all kinds and the film is full of them--many are young and handsome with lovely accents. Richard from Texas (Richard Jenkins) is the annoying, but generous man who befriends Liz at an ashram in India. Felipe (Javier Bardem) nearly kills Liz with his truck in Bali--then captures her heart. Ketut (Hadi Subiyanto) is the medicine man who grounds her when confusion intervenes.

Italy serves to awaken in her the romance of pleasure. India offers a taste of devotion, stillness, compassion. Wisdom and love await her in Bali.

Liz attends an Italian language school while in Rome so her chapters there are full of the rhythm and romance of those words. The story is woven together with the thread of a conversation among friends in Italy--the notion that each each place and person has a word. Rome's word is sex. Giovanni's word is half-assed. Luca Spaghetti's word is surrender. She does not know what her word is, but by the end of the film, Liz finally names a word. Attraversiamo--Let's cross over. The story celebrates living on the border between the stability of tradition and the promise and peril of the unknown and making choices to go one way or another.