The Players…
Julia Roberts, with James Franco, Javier Bardem, Viola Davis, Billy Crudup, Richard Jenkins, Sophie Thompson, Luca Argentero and Gita Reddy (just because).
The Story…
Based on the memoir of the same name, Liz dumps her immature husband in search of truth and fun. Go globetrotting to the corners of the Earth to “find herself,” whatever that means anymore.
However we all know that to know ourselves, the truth lies within and yadda yadda yadda. Who wants gelato?
The Rant…
We’ve all made bad choices.
Sticking with a career we hate. Dropping out of school. Mixed up in a sh*tty relationship that goes on too long. That tribal tat on your face. Writing a blog about mediocre movies. What have you. Life’s filled with bad choices, as if to offset the positive ones. Funny thing that, good choices are their own reward, but seldom immediate. Chances are you didn’t realize you made one until well into the positive circumstances said choice provided. Like until you get a promotion, or see your kid graduate from college, or finally score that top 10 hit. Stuff like that takes some time to achieve, but all the sweeter with the waiting.
Bad choices? Ah. A bit more slippery.
I’d like to think most folks who find themselves in an existential pickle kinda knew what they were signing up for, and the throughput arrives rather quickly. Sometimes not even unexpectedly. For example you might’ve gotten hints at the outset your new girlfriend might have some daddy issues based on all the portraits of him scattered around her apartment. All of them of him glaring at the lens. Maybe you keep finding cashing missing from your wallet, a reflection of how often your kid goes missing, usually to the neighbors’ garage. You know, the one with three angry pitbulls tied to a semi-truck hub in the fenced off, neglected, dirt patch of a backyard. Or perhaps when your boss calls you into the office one day after sick leave and politely, but forcefully, requests you tell him what meds you’re on (true story!).
An unhealthy dose of denial precludes the slipperiness. Those nagging doubts you squeeze into the basement of your cerebrum. The mounting evidence of dishevelment that you keep excusing. That rattlesnake in your bed you woke up to. Twice. Nah, none of this can be happening. Roadbumps along the road of life these are. Hey, where’s my wallet?
If you’re a thinking person, you may eventually realize you’re embedded in a sh*tstorm of your own making through poor decisions. That it’ll be a hard way out, if you ever want out. Truth ultimately wins out though, and it’s yours to behold. Now there’s this man in the mirror calling, and you’d wish to put him on hold. Indefinitely.
This is part of the lesson where you feel you need to perform some dreaded “soul searching.” You wake up one morning and make a new choice: take stock of your life. Might be a bad choice again, the desire to ask yourself, “What went wrong?” Or, “What did I do to deserve this?” Or most likely, “What do I do now? Where do I go from here?”
That’s easy: escape. Leave it all behind and start over somewhere else. Sure. That’s the ticket. Pull up stakes and start a new life, with or without the witness relocation program. Lots of people dissatisfied with their station in life consider travel. Get away from it all, literally. But there are roadblocks. Finances, for one. You’re tied to that sh*tty job, therefore the finance thing keeps churning. Dump the spouse and/or kids? Not happening…yet. You have all these anchors, all of them feeding into if not cementing your crummy, soul-crushing, confusing life. The life you so desperately want to escape. Quite the conundrum.
So, travel. Imagine if, if you had the wherewithal to set foot out of the nest. Get miles, maybe countries away from your troubles. Experience cultures alien to your own. Meet people totally unlike anyone in your craptastic circle of friends. Hell, get a decent meal instead of those endless Lean Cuisines choking up your freezer. But pause, this might just be a case of the grass being greener. Face it, it’s hard to separate yourself from your lousy life decisions when anything, anywhere else would be better than here.
Your life—the life you wished you had before the fallout of your own design—might be out there waiting for you to catch up. It’s a scary prospect however to make that leap into the unknown. As much as you might hate the stupid decisions that have held you down, it’s familiar. You (think you) have control of your situation, and for all its flaws it’s comfortable.
You gotta get out of that comfort zone. Ain’t done you much good, has it? So yeah, leave. Leave it all behind. Find yourself. All over again. Make this choice a good one. But be careful, in your goal of learning who you once were and what could be, you might not like what you find.
Or maybe not…
Liz Gilbert (Roberts) is an esteemed, successful travel writer. She’s in a nice marriage with Stephen (Crudup), her slightly petulant husband. Her apartment is perfect, complete with the kitchen of her dreams. Money in the bank. Reputation impeccable within the writing community. Wanting for nothing.
Then how come Liz is miserable?
She knows she has the ideal, cosmopolitan life. Why should she be miserable? Well, she’s a travel writer and for far too long Liz got mixed up in setting down roots in a world that doesn’t fit. So she decides to make some very rational, practical decisions to turn things around.
Divorce Stephen. Shack up with hot, young aspiring actor David (Franco) to shake away the divorce blues. Listen to her best buddy Delia’s (Davis) advice and get off her ass, go visit the world again. This time minus any writing assignments. Check out Italy, India and Bali. Soak up some culture. Find a guru. Find a nice guy whose not obsessed with tomorrow.
Get a good meal for f*ck’s sake…
Christ, this one was dreadful.
Again, showing my hand, but man.
Hey, I like TV travelogues. Anthony Bourdain’s No Reservations and A Cook’s Tour. National Geographic Explorer. The Jeff Corwin Experience. Anything about places and people and things that if I had the time and money I’d go there in a hot minute. But I’m broke, haven’t accrued enough frequent flyer miles and can only speak three languages: American, Canadian and British. That and I hate jet lag.
I figured that based on my passive-aggresive wanderlust and wishing I was wrestling with giant frogs in the Yucatan and later chowing down on Montreal poutine slathered with salsa and mushrooms Eat Pray Love would be right up my alley as well as conveniently following The Standard. Heck, the movie was based on the best-selling, real life memoir by the actual Liz Gilbert. She lived what she wrote about, after all. And this movie adaptation starred America’s reliable sweetheart Julia Roberts! What could go wrong?
Right. Plenty.
I’m going to try, try not to slam Eat Pray Love into the dirt too hard. I understand it is my custom to get into a frothing frenzy here at RIORI when I watch a really crappy film. The kind you feel cheated for having seen, and I can’t remember the last time I took apart some mediocre movie here that didn’t enrage me in the last month or so (I have a lot of imaginary ticket stubs to throw in the faces of a lot of imaginary ushers). No. I’m going to try to be methodical in my analysis of Eat‘s pitfalls with a minimum of bile.
Why? Because this movie was a sad waste of potential. It had the air of doing the right thing, but its execution and overall tenor was so treacly, sour and worst of all boring (I know, how can a travelogue be boring?). It could have been a lot better. Obviously so.
Eat‘s biggest crime was that it was derivative. Very derivative. The wifey sat down with me to watch the thing for the first half hour. She gave up in disgust and stomped out of the room. She’s the one who labeled the movie derivative. After 30 minutes, and she almost never watches the movies I destroy with me for any appreciable amount of time (half hour or no). She found the first half hour of Eat lame, stupid and—you guessed it—derivative. She was quite correct, and I reached the same correct conclusion 90-plus minutes later. Well, truth be told, it took me over three hours to watch the thing in full. My attention kept wandering, and the viewing was interspersed with way too many cigarette, snack and bathroom breaks. Whether I needed them or not. I rationalized I needed them to get through the drudgery.
Sorry. Getting bitter. But disappointing movies do that to me. Now let’s get technical.
When I—she—said Eat was derivative here’s what the vibe was. Well after that crucial half hour mark, yet well-established within those 30 minutes there was a stink of Hollywood tampering. I’m not talking about director Murphy taking a lot of liberties with the source material. I never read the book myself, but I knew it was a hot ticket at Barnes & Noble since the last Ice Age, apparently something sweating to be made into a movie or TV series or video game or something. Hollywood apparently was champing at the bit. Taking any liberties here was most likely a tricky prospect at best (where was Liz gonna go first? Venus?). Still, I smelled that a travel movie would be more about the destination, and not the traveller. I mean, Bourdain made his shows about the places and people with him just as a witness. All he added was snarky commentary and cursory explanations about cultural and historical hot points. It wasn’t him yammering on and on and on about himself; the places he visited did the talking.
Murphy sure didn’t take hints from Bourdain. More like he took orders from the studio for Eat. Marching orders.
Eat may have been about Liz’ adventures, but sure as sh*t is wasn’t about Liz. At least not directly. Here’s where the derivations commenced. Dissatisfied woman looking down the barrel of a mid-life crisis. Looking in the mirror and asking where her dreams went. Burns old life to the ground. Shacks up with various men of vitality (through her rosey lenses). Reasserts who she is via escape. Start over elsewhere in unfamiliar climes of her dreams in search of happily ever. As Bourdain quoted, “Go bamboo.”
Sigh.
The whole “fish out of water” bit has been done to death ten times over, and it ain’t any better for the eleventh time. Liz as the innocent abroad is a character so tired it went to bed and tossed the alarm clock in the toilet years ago. Recalling the whole “let the pictures do the talking” aesthetic when doing a travelogue, it’s never the destination but the journey. Everything, everything in Eat is punctuated by Liz’ wonder, angst, fears and waaay too much about her and her anxieties. The real Liz’ story is probably just as personal, but well lacking on her focus on…her. The places she went are the stars of the show I’ll bet. Her reflecting on the when and where is where we learn who Liz is and maybe was. Felt like Murphy deemed this as too heady and made Roberts the absolute center of her travels.
If this was the case (and it sure tasted that way) then our avatar Roberts was not invested in her role. What’s made Roberts a go-to actress for the past quarter century is her skill at conveying both humor well-paired with vulnerability. This holds true as far back as Pretty Woman well into Notting Hill and even her other biopic Erin Brockovich, of which she won an award. There’s a passive self-consciousness in her selected roles. Passive. Her Liz is so painfully self-aware there is no charm. At the outset our heroine both equally, stereotypically fragile and resolved. Cut and dried. There is no humor, at least nothing that sticks. There is no subtlety. Roberts’ Liz is just going through the motions, motions completely out of synch with a travel movie about self-discovery. It’s understood that people travel to get out of their comfort zone and maybe learn something about themselves in the process. Liz’ globetrotting in Eat is rote; it is precisely what audiences are supposed to expect. It is what Murphy’s vision is. It is connect the dots. It is not about the journey, it is about Liz. And only Liz. Roberts is completely reactive in Eat and her signature fragile charm is all but absent. She’s a cipher for a thousand dissatisfied housewives, passport at the ready or no. Her acting is shameful here. Roberts has a lot of strong, emotional attributes. Being willowy is not one of them.
Since Roberts’ failings as she was directed really bogged down the film there must be a counterbalance. Despite Murphy’s style reeking of hackwork, a great deal of Eat‘s technical execution was quite good. There was a lot of what I call rolling camera work. You know, trying to maximize space with great cinematography, thereby essential to tell the story beyond the story. Remember Eat is a story of exploration, be it within and without. Since Liz is bounding around the globe trying to find her own private Shangri-La we better f*cking get eyeballs full of expansive swaths of local color. The rolling camera work succeeds. Everything feels intimate yet wide. There’s plenty of time allowed to absorb where Liz is and what she sees. It’s the only aspect of a travel story where the place outshines the traveler, and it makes for a pretty picture. But just that. Granted Roberts’ performance unfortunately enhances this effect, but without her indifferent screen presence this effect wouldn’t have worked as well. Odd really. I took what I could get here.
Still Eat was derivative, it’s biggest sin. Murphy either dropped the plot (literally) or was charmed by the producers holding the pennies (one of whom was Brad Pitt, BTW. Does he really need more cred by now?) to make a “safer” picture. At any rate, Eat‘s end-run was dull and predictable, overly so. We’re even talking right down to Liz REDACTED, thereby turning her life around. Such a trope is f*cking stale, and derivative of a million “get away from it all” stories. A movie about world travel? How could that be boring? Well, it could’ve been a lot more interesting if Eat didn’t play out so safe. By safe I mean tepid, sappy and a healthy dose of pandering to Middle American audiences. Did I mention the pacing was like syrup? Again, stoning offense for a travelogue; it’s all about forward motion in the final analysis.
Eat was intermittently interesting, if not entertaining. When Liz wasn’t moping about, Murphy’s limited skills did indeed shine. He had a keen eye for capturing the vibrance of places afar for us poor, myopic American schlubs stuck in the McDonald’s drive-thru queue. But the other side of the coin demanded so many eye-rolls. At his hand, Eat‘s potential to be truly eye popping was hampered by his moving Roberts from position to position and insist the throughput was held exclusively in her eyes. Very little reflection, precious little. At least anything convincing, therefore meaningful.
In conclusion Eat was a drag, and claiming also a big let-down (if regarding this installment, quite the truism). It was boring. It lost the plot, well before one got established. I hope the real Liz Gilbert was well compensated for the probable bastardization of her beloved, best-selling book. So much potential was wasted here. So much. I know I said earlier I’d keep the ire to a minimum, and I’d like to believe me being clinical here achieved that. Still Eat was the kind of movie I’d be screaming in tongues about with paroxysms of frustration and where the f*ck the last 2 hours went. Longer including a pack of smokes, many beers, a ham sandwich and a small load of laundry. My attention was not held.
That being said, I think I’ll get back to polishing some mirrors, ask myself why I got that tribal tat back in the 90s and locate some really decent pasta. Barring watching a decent movie, what else is there?
Getting my wallet away from those pitbulls. That’s what.
The Verdict…
Rent it or relent it? Relent it. F*cking frustrating. Anathema to any proper tale of travel, not to mention the “Cinderella story” interwoven into the traveling fabric. Any smart person will hate this movie. There. There’s the bile.
Stray Observations…
- “You wanted that toaster!”
- Ever wonder if Roberts gets smile cramps?
- “Do you need a Xanax?” “Always.”
- First time I ever watched a movie without watching it. Sandwiches can’t make themselves.
- “She thinks I changed my name to ‘Motherf*cker’.” Had to laugh at that.
- Jenkins’ soliloquy is the best acting in the entire film.
- “Do you always talk in bumper sticker?”
- However cheesy, Liz’ adventures in Rome sure looked appealing.
- “My place.”
- Who thinks the real Liz Gilbert should be given her own show on the Travel Channel? Hands?
- “See you later, alligator.”
Next Installment…
Like all good illusionists declare, “Now You See Me, now you don’t.” Let’s hope it’s not how I may feel about this movie.