‘Eat Pray Love’ or — Attack of the Rampant Narcissist?
Liz (Julia Roberts) has an absolutely unbearable life: she’s a travel writer who has just bought herself a new bikini; she has an adoring husband who’s a pastry chef; she has caring friends and a massive New York apartment. The only problem is her existence isn’t flawlessly perfect, so Liz throws her toys out the pram and sleeps with the leading man in the terrible play she’s written. When adultery fails to bring her enlightenment she craves she decides to do the only responsible thing and that’s quit her job, abandon everyone she knows and travel to Italy, India and Bali so she can make bad life decisions abroad and, ultimately, learn absolutely nothing about herself in the process. Oh, and she’s getting paid to do all this so she can write it up into a book, appear on ‘Oprah’ and make millions by the spiritual practise of selling ‘Eat Pray Love’ merchandise to countless gullible morons.
Anyway, once in Italy Liz is finally able to do all the things she’s never done before and only dreamed of such as eating ice cream, trying spaghetti and discovering something called a “pizza”… even though she lived in fucking NEW YORK CITY, a place where you obviously can’t get ice cream, pasta or pizza! The ice cream is especially mind-blowing. It makes her SO happy! And the spaghetti? Well, strap yourself in because it turns out that to eat spaghetti you have to twirl it round your fork and then suck it up through your lips. WOW! She can’t believe it! In fact, she’s so easily amused that I started wondering why she had to travel the world to find happiness in the first place when she’d have been just as blissfully content sitting in her living room with a ball on the end of a piece of string.
Oh, and it transpires that pizza is a flat, round, dough base covered in tomato sauce and cheese cooked in an oven. Thank Christ THAT was explained!
She’s also transported to heaven by trying something called a “pastry”… even though she used to be married to a pastry chef which makes me wonder if she left him because a/ — he kept this fact secret from her throughout their entire marriage, or b/- he never let her eat any of his pastries and would simply gaslight her with them instead?
Then it’s onto India where she joins an ashram and realises that she is, in fact, God. Not LIKE God or at one with God but actually and literally God. At no point in the film is this flagged up as a massive cause for concern.
She then listens to a man burst into tears as he tells Liz the heart-breaking story of his young son and how, one day, it turned out that… er… nothing happened to him at all, that he’s totally fine and he now has a happy life and loving family. What? ‘Eat Pray Love’ pulls this kinda shit constantly in that because it can’t upset its audience by showing them anything genuinely upsetting (this has to be a feel good film at ALL times) it’s reduced to generating faux tension and drama instead. At one point we have a flashback to the big traumatic event from Liz’ past which turns out to be having the wrong song played at her wedding… even though she still liked the song they played and she still had a great time. Yet this, THIS is her deep wound? An absence of Neil Young’s ‘Harvest Moon’?!
Likewise when we meet Javier Bardem. There’s a scene where he bursts into tears because his son is going away, but his son is over eighteen, only going back to college for a month or so and they’ve just spent a great week together at the beach meaning it’s like watching a grown adult break down and weep because his goldfish has just died.
Then it’s onto Bali where real tragedy strikes — Liz falls off her bike and slightly grazes her knee. She then meets the previously mentioned Javier Bardem with whom she has so much sex she contracts a bladder infection (?!). The film ends with the two of them sailing into the sunset together to live on an island full of parrots and, hopefully, a decent supply of antibiotics for Liz.
‘Eat Pray Love’ is fucking awful. Julia Roberts’ Liz isn’t a real human being by any definition but purely erratic, inconsistent and possibly insane. She leaves a trail of destruction in her wake, demonstrates psychopathological tendencies, is obviously a sex and/or love addict and has only one concern — self-glorification.
The dialogue is unbearably trite and badly written (“Remember you said we should live together and be unhappy so we can be happy?”), the direction anaemic and the only transforming arc Liz completes is going from being totally obnoxious to wholly insufferable. It’s also a rom-com where the lead character falls in love with themselves, something that should’ve been apparent from the very opening when Liz manages to go from talking about the Cambodian genocide to her sex life in the same bloody sentence.
The film is also too long, something made even worse by the fact I watched the director’s cut. It then struck me that despite all the stupid, appalling, ridiculous shit Liz got up to on her travels across the world the one thing she didn’t do was watch the director’s cut of ‘Eat Pray Love’. So who’s the fucking idiot now?
