Movies That Quarantine Makes Better...Kind of: EAT, PRAY, LOVE

So, like all of you, I have time on my hands. Instead of eating and slowly disappearing into my couch I have decided to revive my movie review blog. Because what the hell else are you supposed to do when a virus is streaking outside besides stay inside and watch movies? Discussing movies with my boyfriend is not as satisfying as I want it to be. So, I will come on here and discuss them with all of you possibly infected people. Which movie did it? Which aroused me to the point where I had to shake the dust off this mumblecore post grad soap box? It was Eat, Pray, Love and the fading charm of Julia Roberts.

 I will save the suspense: Eat, Pray, Love is not a good film. People have known this for 10 years. The movie has been out for 10 years. But I watched it again on IMDB TV and I did not think it was as bad as I initially thought. Granted, when I first saw this movie I was just out of college, the ink on my English degree not even dry yet. My job for four years had been to think critically about every piece of art put in front of me and to lampoon it viciously if it did not soak with meaning and verve. Things are different now. I am different. In my organelles, I am different. If my mind were those posters that showed the different parts of a cow, the difference between my mind then and my mind now would be vast. My mind then was leaner, more fertile. There was space to grow. Now, my brain is fatter, its grown bigger with more experience than knowledge. Facing Eat, Pray, Love with this brain, it is better. But in that I realize that my original conclusion was the correct one.

What is wrong with this movie? How can so much add up to so little? I think the issue is this: In the pages of the book, I am sure the journey to find self-love and satisfaction that Liss goes on feels personal and important. But the stretching and stuffing process of filmmaking did not do the story any favors at all. The director, Ryan Murphy, is also the creator of Glee and American Horror Story. Those shows are great, but he got too ambitious with this movie. The pair of them, Roberts and Murphy turned a sweeping journey into a fluffy feel good film with ersatz spirituality whose best moments do not hold a candle to Nora Ephron in her most phoned in screenplays. If the movie had scaled back a bit and settled for just entertaining, it may have been good. But since it wanted to change your life along with Julia Roberts, it falls flat.

 The beginning moments are unbearable. Julia Roberts is beautiful, white, successful, and unhappy, a familiar character that even in 2010 we were kind of done with, right? The reason for her unhappiness is even less clear than the usual reasons given this kind of character. She is gifted in every way, but she just cannot “see herself in the life she’s built,” whatever that means.  She divorces Billy Crudup (who seems to have had layer after layer of talent striped from him every year since Almost Famous. He’s a skinless onion now. a hollow wooden boy puppet man. Did you ever see Stage Beauty? What the fuck happened to Billy Crudup after Stage Beauty?!) and then dives into the bed of the pseudo spiritual James Franco, who is not that bad in the film. I expected him to be a Smith Jerrod type, but he dropped some lines in the right spot so kudos to him. It is one of the only things I’ve seen him in where I haven’t thought he was parodying himself somehow.

So why did I enjoy the film? Well, watching the movie in the comfort of your home, dressed in a giant hoodie after eating an enchilada can make Dude, Where’s My Car look like a masterpiece. But there is more: I appreciate the good parts more than I hate the bad parts now. I can tell the book was well-written because there are several good lines in the film. There are unexpectedly deep words shared between Roberts and Franco. And everyone in the film is trying hard to shade in an extra dimension to their character. At times they even trick you into thinking they are more than just Shutter Stock figures from a “friendly foreign person” search. But only few succeed in doing this. Sadly, not even wearing fuzzy socks everyday all day can change the fact that Eat, Pray, Love wastes all its hype and great actors. Julia Roberts unfortunately, the anchor of the film, is the least multidimensional of all. Behind all her tears and hysterical breakdowns, there does not feel like there is much there. In a movie with a lot of rich food on display, she is as thin and wispy as a wafer. The other actors barely achieve more than Hall Mark Movie character depth with the notable exception of Richard Jenkins as that one-character Roberts meets at an Ashram in India. This phrase is bandied about too often, but Jenkins’ performance deserved a better movie. It is a shame that his warmth and heartbreaking monologue were buried under the Smoltz and predictability of this movie. Javier Bardem was super-hot at that time. It was honestly nice to see his big tearful face again. It was a little annoying though how he, and too many other characters in the film, used sex to describe things that really didn’t need sex as an analogy (“A pluot if is a plum made love to an orange”….really?) All that being said, the best thing that can be said about Eat, Pray, Love is that its shiny beautiful emptiness creates a nice fluffy hole to sink into during quarantine.