Eat, Pray, Snore.
In a reckless move, I decided to spend three pound fifty on a (recycled) movie I knew I would hate. I was looking forward to an evening of experiencing that special type of pleasure schadenfreude offers a smart-ass for knowing better; hate-watching.
Eat pray love is not good for that.
In fact, I very much doubt it’s good for anything. The plot we all sort of know: she divorces her husband (because he can’t get his life together, or something…?) dives into the next impossible relationship (oh those pesky hormones…) and then goes on a year-long journey of self-discovery to Italy (to eat) India (yup) and Bali. (..ten points for keeping us guessing with that title.) Now let’s fill in some of the details. And we’ll stick to some indeed, as this movie was about 2,5 hours too long.
Elizabeth is a highly-paid freelance writer, who attends fancy book parties. We start with her visiting some medicine man/guru type in Bali. The toothless, authentic, word-of-mouth guru, (who speaks English remarkably well, to no-one’s surprise of course) prophesizes she will lose all her money, get it back, have one short marriage and one long one, and will return to Bali to see him. Boom. Element of surprise ruined. He then gives her a pretty picture to remind her to decide with her heart, not her head, proving great psychic insight into her soul. Elizabeth scoops up this tourist ploy like it’s fat-free ice cream, and the rest of the movie is dedicated to showing us exactly how self-fulfilling prophecies work.
She returns home, realizes she doesn’t want to have a baby when her friend/literary agent (?) gushes about hers, doesn’t love her husband anymore and that her cushy life no longer suits her. So she divorces her husband, lets him have all her money (because she feels bad for him? or something?) shacks up with her new lover until it all falls apart, and then lives with her friend for a while (while learning Italian in the bath tub because it’s such a pretty language) before deciding to go travel and discover her true self. One quick wiki search after the credits finally started rolling taught us she paid for this little trip with her $200 000 book advance. Poor Elizabeth indeed.
Let’s start with Italy, aka the least annoying bit of the movie. Elizabeth seems determined to learn Italian, which is cool. She makes a sweet Scandinavian friend, gets herself a tutor, and eats pasta with a fork while reading the newspaper with a dictionary- so far so good. She decides gaining weight is cool too, so she shops for “big-girl pants,” which this stick figure is clearly in desperate need of after a month of ingesting things with actual carbohydrates. Squeezing herself into a new pair of jeans she has to lie down for to zip up properly really brings home the point of Elizabeth’s newfound acceptance of her imaginary muffin top. Seriously, people, I bet those were size 2 jeans! Tutto bene, I hear you say. But this is a false sense of security the director is creating to make you think this woman is less obnoxious than she actually is.
Now on to the ashram in India, where we learn Elizabeth can’t meditate, scrub floors, or even shut up for more than 10 minutes -which is approximately how long her self-imposed vow of silence took. But hey, she gets props for trying, right? She makes friends with a fellow American who tries to get her to see how privileged she is and calls her groceries. Of course he fails, because Groceries doesn’t really want to think about that. Groceries is way too busy thinking about herself. This becomes painfully obvious when she makes friends with an Indian girl who wants to go to college but has to be arranged-married instead. She confides in Groceries, but Groceries obviously has little wisdom to offer, except that she’s prayed for her (ha!) and that she saw Indian girl happy with her husband in a dream or vision of some kind. At the arranged-marriage wedding, she reminisces about her own wedding and how cute her ex-husband was. And this is when it starts to really sink in with the viewer how tedious self-obsession is to watch from the outside.
But wait, we’re not done yet- there’s still Bali, where Elizabeth finds her former guru and wants to learn from him (?) after he barely remembers their visit a year or so ago. Thankfully, the pretty picture she’s kept brings it all back to him. What she’s doing in Bali except for riding bicycles, “studying” with her “guru” and paying visits to a beauty salon is not clear, but who cares? She falls in love. (Surprise!) With a somewhat overemotional and oversensitive Brazilian businessman- but nobody can ever not like Javier Bardem and I’m totally with her there. In the meantime, her beauty salon friend needs money to buy a house, because well- it’s Bali, where poverty is kind of a big thing. Elizabeth wants to help, and asks her friends for donations for her birthday so this woman can build herself a house. Points to Groceries for being less self-involved, although one has to wonder: surely she must have had a little pocket money left over from that formidable advance? Why did she have to ask her friends back home for cash? Is the rent for her little Bali bungalow really that steep?
Little pesky details aside, her travels seem to have done her good. She even seems a little less neurotic now- until at the end, for reasons unclear, she creates drama with the boyfriend, which at this point I don’t think I can recall because I was probably ASLEEP. Which I’m guessing is the fate of any self-thinking creature who watches this movie.
The main character is lacking in self-awareness to such an extent that the movie just drags on: save for one short instance where she realizes a vow of silence really isn’t her thing, this woman seems to be a rather passive figure in the life that takes place around her, observing the events that take place around her. For a movie that’s supposed to be all about self-discovery, this is a remarkable feat. Two hours of trying to feel some type of connection with a spoiled, self-involved main character wears you down, so it’s best to completely refrain from trying. But seeing as Elizabeth Gilbert is a very accomplished writer, I’m hoping this will be one of those instances where the book is definitely better, although strangely enough, I don’t think I feel very inspired to find out for myself.
