REVIEW: Two Out of Three Isn't Bad For Gorgeous, Globetrotting Eat Pray Love

Admittedly, you'd have to be a real screw-up to make a movie like Eat Pray Love look bad, but Richardson's lush visuals get us through even the sloggiest chunk of the movie: The one in which Liz finds some sort of accord within herself by meditating in India. Murphy, the producer of Nip/Tuck and Glee, has one other feature film to his credit, the 2006 Augusten Burroughs adaptation Running with Scissors, and here, you can almost sense his desperate efforts to hold this saggy midsection aloft. Richard Jenkins, a marvelous actor, shows up as a character known as Richard from Texas, who befriends Liz at the ashram. But even though this character is based on a real-life guy, that doesn't keep him from being a dud: Jenkins is forced to spout the usual spiritual pep-talk stuff, before crumpling into a heap when he describes, AA-style, his own crushing failures. Just because it happened in real life doesn't automatically make it effective in movie terms.

But to paraphrase Edmund Kean (or whoever it really was): Eating is easy; praying is hard. And once you get to loving, you're pretty much home free. Murphy manages to resuscitate Eat Pray Love in its last third. That's also the point at which Roberts reaches her apex of likability and radiance. In recent years, Roberts has been tagged as irrefutable proof that a woman just can't open a movie. She has also been charged with some other, even more horrible crimes, such as being "too old."

But Roberts is precisely the right actress to play this character: She adamantly refuses to be adorable -- she'd rather just unleash that crazy, unladylike cackle. And her scenes with Bardem (who knows how to play a dreamboat with an actual soul) have an incandescent lightness to them. She cracks wise; he responds not by undressing her with his eyes, but by melting her with them. At one point Liz laments that she's afraid to become too involved with him because she'll "lose herself," and you get what she means: Once you go swimming in those eyes, you might never make your way back.

Eat Pray Love does contain its share of dreadful, self-helpy dialogue -- this is, after all, just the latest entry in the classic "woman finding herself" genre. But if you can close your ears to at least some of that dreary rot, Eat Pray Love works quite serviceably as a light comedy and a pleasing travelogue. And unlike so many movies these days, it at least gives us something to look at: Good-looking movie stars dotting some of the world's most beautiful landscapes. That's something to love right there, and a prayer that doesn't get answered often enough.

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