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Who will benefit more from a big-screen adaptation of Elizabeth Gilbert's best-seller, Eat, Pray, Love: travel agents or divorce attorneys?
Ryan Murphy's travelogue drama of the soul -- like the memoir he loyally adapts -- romanticizes such selfishly liberating decisions as leaving your husband, abandoning your job, and circling the globe to find your inner balance. But vibrant editing, an intelligible screenplay, and a magnetic performance by Julia Roberts keep Eat, Pray from dipping too far into self-indulgence.
Roberts plays Gilbert at a crossroads. While her close friends are slowing down and having babies, the magazine writer with lofty ambitions has woken up to the fact that she married a child (Billy Crudup). Against the advice of her gal pal, Delia (Viola Davis), Gilbert divorces her husband and embarks on a journey to find herself.
Her first port is a safe but similarly limiting relationship with a handsome young actor (James Franco). Realizing she needs major changes to shake the dust off her existence, Gilbert grabs her passport and heads overseas. The Eat of the title refers to Italy, where Gilbert hopes she'll rekindle her appetite for life. Pray takes her to India, and the ashram of a wise guru. And in Bali, she learns to Love again with the help of an impossibly charming Brazilian divorcee (Javier Bardem).
This is not news to Gilbert's devoted fan base, though they'll want to hear that Murphy treats the author's cherished insights with a not-entirely-warranted reverence. If Gilbert's bite-sized life lessons like "God dwells within you as you" speak to you, then Eat, Pray will provide the cinematic bible you seek. It can be a Chicken Soup for the Restless Wanderer's Soul, a manifesto condensed into one gorgeously photographed, 2-hour-and-13-minute escape.
The rest of us who dismiss Gilbert's actions as selfish might have to work a little harder to meet this character halfway. It's here, then, that Roberts becomes invaluable to Eat, Pray's success. Her natural likability, her openness, her radiance, her fragility, and her resiliency sell Gilbert's journey to the skeptics. As my wife pointed out after our screening, an Eat, Pray with a self-adoring actress in the lead (say, Cameron Diaz) would be insufferable.
It has been ages since Roberts put a production on her back -- or, more appropriately, on that award-winning smile -- and carried it across the finish line as she does here. Roberts doesn't demand that we follow Gilbert on this path. In fact, Murphy peppers in characters who routinely question the woman's actions. But those who give in to the story benefit from Roberts's warm handling of some coarse, emotional material.
Murphy's durable ensemble picks up the gauntlet that the actress has thrown down. Each male actor excels in Roberts's presence, with Richard Jenkins emerging as a frontrunner for Oscar consideration, thanks to his wise-beyond-years performance as a Texan seeking peace in India.
I also love that Brad Pitt's Plan B Entertainment helped produce Eat, Pray, so that a stark, black-and-white "Plan B" logo is the first and only title card we see before Murphy's introspective journey begins. How appropriate. For isn't this a story about one woman searching for her Plan B after the first life she set up for herself didn't work out the way she'd hoped?
Gilbert's final monologue details her belief in the physics of a quest. I believe in a similar formula applied to a satisfying drama, and Eat, Pray, Love follows it to the letter.
