(©Columbia Pictures/courtesy Ever)
A year-long, around-the-world quest for self-fulfillment that basically goes nowhere, “Eat Pray Love” is a very shallow, very glossy 2½-hour travelogue starring a miscast Julia Roberts as a spoiled, self-centered divorcée who decides to get away from it all.
Though it’s based on a hugely popular, Oprah-endorsed memoir by Elizabeth Gilbert, there’s little in the script or in Roberts’ wrongheaded Big Movie Star Performance to explain why, in the space of six months, Elizabeth dumps both her husband of a decade (Billy Crudup) and a younger actor/yogi (James Franco), both of whom adore her.
Most likely she’s bored, a sentiment that will likely be felt most acutely by guys dragged to see this overproduced, self-congratulatory collage of New Age-y clichés.
PHOTOS: JULIA ROBERTS’ LEADING MEN
“You know what I feel when I get up in the morning?” whines Elizabeth. “Nothing.”
That’s pretty much how I felt about this movie, except for the first section, which takes our heroine to Italy where she learns “You Americans don’t know how to enjoy yourselves” from the natives and eats up a storm.
The food is enticingly photographed, and it made me hungry — but I was hungrier still for a story that involved any crisis larger than Elizabeth (who still looks near anorexic) struggling to get into a pair of jeans after a pasta-and-pizza binge.
This near-total lack of dramatic conflict continues when Elizabeth arrives at an ashram in a very well-scrubbed India, no doubt with Pratesi sheets in her backpack.
Between meditations, Elizabeth endures some very mild needling from a fellow American spiritualist (Richard Jenkins), a recovering alcoholic who dispenses a long string of aphorisms, or, as she calls them, “bumper stickers.”
“I think you have the capacity, some day, to love the whole world,” he tells her with a perfectly straight face.
There’s lots more of these — like “God dwells within you as you,” which hopefully sounded less silly on the printed page than as a line of dialogue.
As the title indicates, the last trip of Elizabeth’s journey — financed by a hefty book advance that goes unmentioned in the movie — involves romance.
By this point, she’s in Bali, where she rents what looks like a $5,000-a-night beachfront cottage.
“Since the bombing, business has been way down, so I can give you this place at a very good price,” says a real estate agent — the only line in this humorless movie that made me laugh, however unintentionally.
Love comes in the form of a sexy Brazilian (Javier Bardem) getting over his own divorce, who literally runs into Elizabeth with a Jeep.
Like all of the other characters in this movie — including Viola Davis, criminally wasted as Elizabeth’s stereotypical, straight-talking African-American best friend, and several condescendingly played natives — this guy exists primarily as a concept. So she can tell him: “I do not need to love you to love myself.”
Though I tend to doubt it, it’s possible that “Eat Pray Love” could have worked with a different star or a less deferential director.
I’m a big fan of Roberts — I gave “Duplicity” four stars — but portraying this type of inner conflict is not in her skill set. It’s something Gwyneth Paltrow, not one of my favorites, did effortlessly in Murphy’s previous feature, “Running With Scissors,” which may have been problematic but at least wasn’t a thumb-sucker like this.
Perhaps an even more apt choice would have been Diane Lane, who played a similar character in the far shorter and more emotionally truthful “Under the Tuscan Sun.”
Even if you buy Roberts as an introspective writer (I didn’t), there’s no real sense of an emotional journey here. Any movie where the protagonist’s biggest problem is whether or not to split her time between New York and Bali is inherently going to be as profound as perfume.