I fall into that last category, and I'm here to report that neither "that" book nor the movie that's been made from it -- directed by Ryan Murphy and starring Julia Roberts, as a woman who finds herself by traveling the world -- is as bad as I'd feared. Gilbert's book details the year in which, after a messy divorce, she trekked to Italy, India and Indonesia -- her friends teased her mercilessly about those three I's, suggesting it would be a lot less trouble just to do the "Great Tri-State 'I' Triumvirate" of Islip, I-95 and IKEA -- as a way of finding some much-needed balance in her life. Cut to 2010: The book has become a big-budget picture, shot in some pretty glorious locales and featuring a big-name movie star. It doesn't even have to be any good, and people will still flock to see it.
Murphy's version of Eat Pray Love may not be perfect. But it doesn't pander to its built-in audience as that most recent horror show, Sex and the City 2, did. Nor does it suffer from the terminal cuteness of the Julie Powell sequences of Nora Ephron's Julie and Julia, another picture marketed heavily to women (although, thankfully, the Julia Child sections constitute at least half a good movie). Eat Pray Love has been made with some thought and care; the script, in particular, adapted by Murphy and Jennifer Salt, faithfully captures the easy-going rhythms and self-effacing good humor of Gilbert's prose. And if the movie falters in the middle -- the dreaded "pray" section -- it at least rebounds in the last third, when Javier Bardem appears, like a knight in a shining jeep, rambling over some pretty bumpy Indonesian roads, to play Roberts' love interest.
Eat Pray Love opens just as Roberts' Liz -- as she's called in the movie -- is realizing her life is falling apart. She has no desire to have a baby with her husband (Billy Crudup, in the somewhat thankless role of the cad). In fact, she suddenly realizes that despite the extremely comfortable life she's built (having written some successful books, the proceeds from which have bought her a nice, big house) that she doesn't want to be married at all. A fling with a young actor (played by everybody's favorite sensitive young hunk, James Franco) ends in tears. So she decides to pack it all in for a year: She'll spend four months in Italy studying Italian and eating, though perhaps not necessarily in that order; four in India, under the tutelage of a guru; and four in Indonesia, where, on an earlier trip, she'd befriended a kindly ninth-generation medicine man (played by the charmingly toothless Hadi Subiyanto) who'd invited her to come back sometime and help him improve his English.
In Italy, Liz eats to beat the band (we're treated to lots of loving close-ups of pasta dishes and pizzas) and learns the importance of feeling OK about being too fat for her jeans. In Indonesia, she embarks on a romance with Bardem's Brazilian hottie Felipe -- as they drift through on open-air market, he tells her which fruits taste as if "an orange made love to a plum" and which taste more like "dirty feet." Meanwhile, cinematographer Robert Richardson (who has worked frequently with Tarantino and Scorsese, as well as Oliver Stone -- can't win 'em all) follows them around lovingly through these natural settings with his camera and healthy doses of sunlight: Both the movie and its stars are bathed in a relentless golden glow, as if God Himself, whoever or wherever He is, had just graduated from USC film school and was eager to prove how well He could light a set -- a set which He Himself, incidentally, built in just six days, coming in way under budget.
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.