Eat Pray Love is the much-anticipated film adaptation of Elizabeth Gilbert’s 2006 memoir fully titled Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman’s Search for Everything Across Italy, India, and Indonesia.  The book lasted 158 weeks on the New York Times Best Seller list and no less than Julia Roberts has been tapped to play Gilbert.  The often-charming film that results is likely to win praise from fans of the book and others in its target audience, but may prove too dull and preachy for the rest of us.

The movie opens with Gilbert visiting a medicine man in Bali who tells her that she will struggle through a divorce, lose all of her money, and then come back to Bali and teach him English.  Six months later back in New York, his prophecy starts to come true.  Liz finally has the guts to bust out of a failing marriage and quickly falls into a relationship with a hot, young actor.  But this fling doesn’t solve her growing depression so she decides to flee the States and spend the rest of the year in Italy, India, and finally, back with her friend the medicine man in Bali.

In Italy, Liz meets some fun locals—and one Swede—who teach her about “the sweetness of doing nothing.”  This is also where the “Eat” part of the title comes from as Liz decides to completely let herself go—it doesn’t show—and enjoy as much of the country’s fine cuisine that she can wrap her lips around.  In India, while living and working for a guru, she learns to let her thoughts go thanks to a fellow American who has also been through a divorce, and a young Indian woman about to embark on the marriage her parents have arranged for her.  This serves as the “Pray” of the title, though it might as well have been “Meditate.”  Finally, Liz returns to Bali where she continues to learn from the wise old medicine man and falls in “Love” with a handsome, sensitive, Brazilian man.

In the forefront of Eat Pray Love is the performance of Roberts, one of her best.  She’s extremely convincing as a woman on a mission to find herself and there are plenty of classic Roberts moments—that laugh!—that remind you why she is a movie star among movie stars.  There are also a couple of highlight reel moments for costars Richard Jenkins and Javier Bardem.  The movie they are in, however, lacks any real momentum and after a while starts to feel somewhat repetitive.

Both problems arise from the film’s structure.  The structure is definitely designed more for the written page than the silver screen as the New York, Italy, India, and Bali sequences form definite chapters.  In a movie format, that makes the story feel very episodic.  Each of these sequences is very similar to the others:  Liz arrives in a country, meets some interesting new people, learns a valuable life lesson, and then moves on.  The life lessons themselves are sure to connect with many people who have gone through a divorce, or other struggles that Liz Gilbert was herself dealing with, but for the rest of us they sound like bumper stickers.  Appropriate, then, that Liz at one point asks one of her mentors: “Do you always speak in bumper sticker?”  By the time we came to the medicine man’s final piece of advice, I was able to predict exactly what he was going to say.

As her trip around the world is the crux of the story, the movie takes a little too long to get there.  The problem is the actor-boyfriend character played by James Franco.  Although certainly crucial to the book, in the movie the role feels superfluous.  We’ve already watched Liz go through a divorce, and then we are forced to sit through another failed relationship before the movie even gets going.  If the character of the boyfriend were combined with the character of the husband, the movie would be able to get to its actual story much quicker.  I’m sure that suggestion won’t sit well with fans of the book, but there’s a reason the most successful film adaptations of popular novels tend to stray away from their source material.

In the end, Eat Pray Love is sure to be one of those movies that will become an instant favorite for those who can most identify with its main character, but will bring little to the table for everyone else.  One thing I’m sure everyone will agree on, however, is that Julia Roberts is still a movie star.

Eat Pray Love is rated PG-13 for “brief strong language, some sexual references and male rear nudity.” Aside from a couple risqué moments, I can’t really think of much to warrant more than a PG rating.

Courtesy of a local publicist, Jeff attended a promotional screening of Eat Pray Love.