Writing a negative review of Eat Pray Love isn't like shooting fish in a barrel. It's like hauling out a fish, placing the barrel of a revolver against its slimy gills, then pulling the trigger while intoning a grave, possibly aquatic-themed, soliloquy. The irony being that Liz Gilbert, the character Julia Roberts plays in the film, would cheerily consume said fish. She would then go on to share some little-known and untranslatable foreign epithet that captures the indefinable feeling of consuming seafood that would have otherwise been destined for the chum bucket. I don't know what the exact term is, but it would probably ends in -delle, or -isimo, or -ante. And then she'd probably peer over her oversized grand-dame shades, breadstick pressed erotically against bottom lip, so she could wink directly to camera as if to say: "I am one of you. Join me."
But I came here to praise Eat Pray Love, Ryan Murphy's largely despised 2010 film, based on the million-selling volume of Martini-time spiritualism by (the actual) Elizabeth Gilbert, not bury it. Demanding that a bile-fuelled film journalist should temporarily suppress his or her ingrained prejudices in order to care about the travails of a successful career woman who, for reasons known only to her, opts to dispense with her strutting, frappuccino-doused Manhattan lifestyle for a year-long romp of global self-discovery, was always going to be a big ask. It's hard not to hate the entitled souls that Roberts's character represents. We may even be turned off by the fact that her character, for most of the film, resembles nothing less than a tie-dyed Quaver.
But this negativity is likely born out of fear, similar to the feeling of seeing an embarrassing photo from your formative years. There are objectionable people in the world. They exist. Why shouldn't movies be made about them? Thus, hating Eat Pray Love is an act of self-hatred, each splenetic tirade directed at the soft-focus screen a lash of the cat 'o nine tales on an already amply withered derriere.
There's a psychological barrier one needs to scale in order to locate any real value or nourishment in a film fronted by a character who might evoke extreme revulsion in one and extreme sympathy in another. With Gilbert, we're given someone who is paddling her toe-ringed feet in both of these murky "feelings pools". She is neither hero nor villain, prophet nor demon. Some will be charmed by her militantly carpe diem attitude to life, while others might baulk at her blasé sense of white liberal entitlement. It's refreshing to consume a piece of cinema that forces the viewer to grapple with an ambivalent central relationship for an extended runtime – a clever reflection of Liz's own untenable feelings about male relationships.
The film also displays the guts not to pander to a conventional story arc, thereby making it a truer representation of real life. It defies cosy cinematic characterisation, combining as it does elements of the romantic comedy, the psychodrama, the visual bildungsroman, the Malickian philosophical tract, the adventure quest movie and, in its giddy formal acrobatics, the Italian giallo genre. The camera frantically hovers and zooms above Liz, chronicling the fragile moments that we take for granted and that inevitably result in small but important epiphanies, and not the ones that we might pre-suppose an onlooker would find interesting.
Her journey is predicated on indecision, and indecision is not a trait that tends to curry much favour in the movies. One of the greatest films ever made, Éric Rohmer's The Green Ray from 1988, tackles this no-no concept head-on, telling the story of a woman (played by Marie Rivière) whose deep-seated depression and possible death anxiety are made manifest by her inability to settle on a destination for her summer holiday. Rohmer never once demands we like his plucky lead, only that we might empathise with her complexities and flaws. The same could be said of Liz Gilbert in Eat Pray Love.
Finally, the thing that most people miss with Eat Pray Love is that it is a piece of satire, a pin-sharp mockery of the source book and all its can-do, "you-go-girl", chakra-aligning aphorisms. Just as Paul Verhoeven repurposed Robert Heinlein's 60s sci-fi novel Starship Troopers by delicately inverting its reactionary themes, so too does writer-director Murphy (perhaps unknowingly) turn Eat Pray Love into a Hogarthian critique of Sunday supplement dream-chasing instigated by people who wear billowy cheesecloth and view all non-Americans as kooky sages. Why else would Roberts be acting as if she is fully conscious that she's in a movie?
Early reports of Murphy's attempts to distance his film from the book by suggesting alternate titles (Antipasti Nights, Meditate on This!, Let's Get Metaphysical, etc) show that he was attempting to impose a supplementary subtextual layer to proceedings. What initially comes across as the result of a drunken game of Expedia Russian roulette soon reaches a plateau of banal transcendence, a kind of feminist 2001: A Space Odyssey, in which Roberts manages to locate a new age in the picturesque seafront coves of Bali. This, it transpires, was a new kind of ultimate trip.
