Review: Eat Pray Love

The film adaptation of Elizabeth Gilbert's memoir deletes the commas in the title—and fails to fill in some of the blanks.

By Amanda Stovall
Published: August 13th, 2010 | 4:25pm

I’ve been holding my breath ever since I learned there would be a film adaptation of Elizabeth Gilbert’s memoir, Eat, Pray, Love. Filmmakers are notorious for mucking up good stories out of some misguided need to adhere to cinematic clichés. After watching the film, I breathed out, finally, but struck off points for two book-to-movie violations. One, it doesn't quite work as a stand-alone work. From a viewer's standpoint, the film's coherence depends on having read the book to fully understand what's going. And two, the writers (or adaptors) take creative liberties in the story to neatly cap off events or make thematic points, even at the expense of undermining the overarching message the filmmakers emphasize.

Eat Pray Love opens with achingly lush scenes of Bali’s landscape that flash by so quickly they’re practically snapshots. Trying to condense a whole year into a film must not have been easy, and filmgoers who had not read the memoir may be left scratching their heads as to why Gilbert, portrayed by the never-aging Julia Roberts, was in Bali visiting a toothless medicine man to begin with. Fast-forward, and we find Gilbert and her husband Stephen (Billy Crudup) at a swank New York party occupied by the presumably literary elite. Both look appalled and awkward at the introduction of a friend’s new baby.

It would seem neither half of the couple were keen on children, until time flashes forward again and we see Gilbert on the floor in a bathroom. weeping and praying for advice on how to exit her marriage. Readers of the book would know this is because Stephen wants kids and Gilbert does not. Audience members new to the material may be just plain confused.

Regardless, the film sets up the catalyst for Gilbert’s flee from matrimony. Shortly after coming to God in the bathroom, Gilbert’s prayers are answered when she sees the lovely, seraphim-like David (James Franco) badly acting a part in her play “Permeable Membrane" with an angelic halo of light crowning his perfect curls. This is where the perfect picture of David ends, as his character is revealed to be a self-deprecating and self-lauding bohemian with an Indian guru’s picture in his fireplace instead of logs.

Both David and Stephen are reduced to comical, albeit sexy caricatures of their novelized counterparts. You might also call Stephen pathetic when, representing himself as a divorce lawyer, he begins singing between sobs about why the marriage shouldn’t dissolve. This effort is in vein, and shortly after we find Gilbert looking at a ramshackle apartment in Rome, Italy.

Here, the film finally slows from its runaway time progressions, and begins focusing on developing Gilbert as a character. This slowdown is easily missed, though, in the barrage of scenic images that constantly grace the scene in two-second increments, further adding to the postcard vignette style of storytelling both the book and the movie rely on. In Italy, Gilbert both learns many important life lessons, such as modern Italian sign language—and the beauty of female "muffin tops."

In India, she meets a caustic character from Texas, Richard, who inexplicably evolves into a friend. Richard nicknames Gilbert “Groceries” because of the habit of overeating she acquired in Rome—something that looks out of place in an Indian ashram. Richard becomes a more pivotal character when he coaches Gilbert through her guilt over her divorce. Here, the movie does a beautiful job of externalizing for the audience what, in the book, was a wholly internal event. The India adventure is capped off nicely when a “rogue elephant,” escaped from a circus, calmly approaches Gilbert for a few pats after she has learned that Ganesh, the Hindu elephant God, is the deity of choice when requesting help to overcome obstacles.

The finale comes at a bit of a contradiction to the film’s essence of female independence and empowerment. I suppose this can’t be faulted though, as it follows the book’s conclusion to the letter, including enlightening quotes from Ketut, the medicine man. Gilbert’s newly found love interest, Felipe, a heart-broken, oversized Brazilian puppy dog with an affinity for mix tapes, is portrayed by Javier Bardem. After falling in love with him three scenes in, I don’t blame Gilbert for giving up some “balance” for love. Ketut's best advice, that “sometimes to lead a balanced life, you must lose your balance for love,” rings true for both Gilbert’s choices and the movie. Eat Pray Love, the film, may not be of award-winning caliber, but it delivers the same emotional resonance that made Eat, Pray, Love, the book, so beloved.