A brief word about Eat, Pray, Love.
I hated this film. I’m told it’s based on a book. I hate the book by proxy.
The European scenes in particular are cloying, faux-foodie nonsense that peddle a wholly imagined vision of Italy. You know the one — the same wholesome, Mediterranean-diet, in vino veritas, happy free-spirit bunk that landlocked American bobos routinely project onto the Continent while slurping wine coolers on a composite deck in the flyovers.
It’s soooo accurate. I mean, the couple of times my family lived in Italy, I relished every fresh fig and sublime, gleaming olive. I played on the language like a Fisher Price xylophone. I swooned over the real, wise, honest Italians who have long known the true secrets to happiness, and are both able and willing to divulge the same in put-on accents at “family-style” Italian dinners.
Yes, it was a fairy tale world — bright colors, warm breezes, wholesome crusty loaves rent asunder by calloused hands and plunged into olive oil that can only be described as divine… I closed my eyes as I ate. Every time. It’s that kind of place. An olive-fueled theophany.
It’s not just Italy. Eat, Pray, Love paints its trio of exotic locations like so many heartwarming, Disney-esque iterations of the same wholly imagined nirvana. This whitewash of travel likely resonates deepest with those who do not travel very much at all.
That’s a real shame. For those unable to spend months visiting these places themselves — that is, almost everyone — Eat Pray Love does a real disservice.
If we could travel more, we would realize that, superficial idiosyncrasies aside, people everywhere live fundamentally similar (and fundamentally routine) lives. This, I think, is among the most valuable lessons to be gleaned from life abroad. That, and the realization that our daily North American problems are for the most part quite unimportant to a large proportion of the people on this planet.
But these real-world lessons evidently don’t sell screenplays, and in any event Elizabeth Gilbert doesn’t seem to know them. Perhaps she was too busy getting in touch with her inner feelings by taking thirty-language audio-tours of paid-entry cathedrals and eating at tourist traps in Naples.
You’re far better off actually traveling somewhere than watching this tripe. How far does $12 get you? On a city bus, probably pretty far. Ride the bus to the end of the line. You’ll learn much more about the human condition in those two hours than you will by watching Julia Roberts “indulge” in novelties like “gelato.” Hell, you might even learn that outside your quiet neighborhood, people are … just people. They’re not warm, angelic creatures waiting to shepherd you into some soft-filtered neo-Eden replete with wholesome experiences. That stuff doesn’t exist. Anywhere. And that’s a lesson that fans of this rubbish would do very well to learn.
HAUS VERDICT: A shallow escapist pseudo-travelogue that sucks too hard to believe.
I saw EPL several times while awaiting execution. It was edutainment at its finesse. Several of the death row inmatess and myself have captured the soul of the main character in an old tobacco tin, and let it out once in a while to teach it strange and frightening new words. Darkness fills her eyes with each of her terrible gains. But there is a silver lining, and that is the 15 minutes of yardwork that the romantic interest does in pursuit of nirvana. For that, I give this movie ten fingers up the bracket.