Eat Pray Love (Friday, August 13, 2010) (101)

Eat Pray Love is based on a book by Elizabeth Gilbert that was gigantically popular a few years ago with women (in particular). The story falls somewhere between "nth-wave" feminism and treacly white urban cosmopolitanism. I fucking hated this stupid film - and hate everything it represents and says about dumb American culture. It is the story about how in an effort to come to terms with female self-dom, women are somehow only able to take cues from men, that women's self-worth is entirely dependent on men and that white people in general use the developing world as their toilet in an effort to sell goddamn herbal soaps and moisturizers.


Liz (Julia Roberts) is a travel writer (that's a real serious fucking job!) who is married to a nice loser of a man, Stephen (Billy Crudup). She grows tired of him, possibly because he's a loser with no direction and possibly because she's a fickle bitch, and gets a divorce. She then moves in with another loser - an actor and yoga, new-age freak, David (James Franco). She complains to her black best friend Delia (Viola Davis) (Ooooh! Look! How cool that she has a black best friend) about her dumb life and decides to travel for a year to find herself because she has never spent time examining who she is inside - rather, she has spent her life bouncing from one guy to another.


She goes to Rome for a few months where she eats and learns to give up counting calories (which we never see her doing before); then she goes to India to meditate with a guru and comes to terms with the pain she feels from losing her two men (which is weird because she was the one who left them - so now she regrets it?); and then to Bali, where she talks to a healer-guru guy who helps her recharge and learn to love again - I guess this time not as a fucking self-centered witch.


In each place she meets white people who are rich enough to not work and fuck around all day. In Rome she falls in with a group of people who love to eat and travel and talk about the rest of the world. In India, despite the fact that the guru is apparently a woman who we never see, she mostly talks to an American guy, Richard (Richard Jenkins) who has some pain in his life that he's working through. (In all fairness, Richard has the most interesting view of things where he says that she fills her head with bullshit and if she were to clear her head, she would experience stuff much better.) In Bali she meets Felipe (Javier Bardem) who is also recovering from a hard divorce, but is a Brazilian fuck-machine and fucks her brains into submission (and love).


All of the white people seem to be totally unaware of the ethnic specialness of their surroundings or the deep socioeconomic differences between their own lives and those of the native peoples they live among. Yes - in Bali, Liz does try to raise money for a woman who has lost all her money in a divorce, but this is presented so lightly that it seems that she doesn't understand that there are probably twelve women down the road who are in similar situations or the amazingness of the ability of woman to get divorces in Indonesia - which most woman cannot get throughout most of the developing world. This moment is pure tokenism and rather upsetting for what it exposes about her aloofness.


The direction of the film by Ryan Murphy (and the adapted script by Murphy and Jennifer Salt) is almost entirely terrible. We barely see Liz in her day-to-day New York life to get a good picture of her. When she suggests that she married a guy when she was "young" and is now "older," it is confusing because the flash-backs to her wedding have her and her husband as the same age they are now - suggesting she got married in her 30s or 40s rather than her teens or 20s. We never really she where she starts to know well enough how much she has grown at the end.


Murphy uses a ton of moving camera shots to make scenes fancier-looking. Some of these shots are clever and actually nice and poignant, but mostly they are overdone and unnecessary. By the end, I was nearly screaming for him to stop moving the camera and give us a simple, straightforward shot with a level horizon. Just because it looks fancy doesn't make it interesting; if what you give us is dog shit in the first place, when you twist it around you just get pretty dog shit.


Ever since Erin Brockovich, Julia Roberts has re-made herself into a bitter woman with an acid tongue ("They're called tits, Ed!"). This role is no different. She's very hard to like because she seems like such an antagonistic person, that it ultimately gets in the way of the story. In the end I just don't like Liz - because she's just another version of the same Julia Roberts character I've seen before and disliked before. I understand that as an actress she has some power over people - but I will never figure out why that power exists or where it comes from. To me Julia Roberts is just Julia Roberts. She's bigger than any character she's ever played and doesn't relate to me as a sympathetic person.


(One more totally unfair thing that I'll say is that this film has a shit-ton of marketing tie-ins from jewelry to food to soaps and skin-care products. Meanwhile the film is not really about this stuff. It's not about consumerism at all - though buying shit is really in the background of everything that happens in the story, even if it's never really examined. Is the idea here that if I liked the movie I can go to the Fresh beauty supply store and buy Eat Pray Love soap and become like Liz? I recognize that the marketing effort has nothing to do with what I see onscreen, but this tone-deafness in licensing is exactly and amusingly the same as the tone-deafness that you find in the film.)

What am I supposed to take from this movie? That we should all get in touch with our inner selves because white men who have tons of money and can afford to not work tell us we should? That if you're lucky enough to lead a life of pure pleasure you will be happy? That brown people are more in touch with the earth and can teach us things about it - but that their poverty makes us sad so we should ignore that?


What I particularly hate about this film is that on the surface it's about how a woman gets in touch with herself by stopping to smell the roses, but it never examines how she has roses at all to smell. I never get the sense that she comes to terms with her inner (or outer) bitch, so I don't know why I should care about her self-proclaimed growth.


Stars: .5 of 4