Eat, Pray, Love

I really didn't want to do this. I still want to pistol-whip Julia Roberts when I hear her utter that odious line from Erin Brockovich, "They're called boobs Ed". But I wanted to review a recent film, and if Roberts incites me to commit violence, Aniston makes me want to commit violence against myself. So, The Switch was out. Off to Eat, Pray, Love I went. Based on Elizabeth Gilbert's smash bestseller of the same name, the film chronicles the journey of one divorced woman looking for enlightenment. Roberts plays Gilbert, a writer who has just ended her marriage, drifted into another unhappy relationship, then decides to take an expansive year-long journey. Each place she visits signifies three different facets of Gilbert's search. Italy (Eat), where Gilbert eschews counting calories and gives in to her hungry id. India (Pray), where she lives in a humble communal ashram and assesses her spiritual well-being, and finally, Bali (Love), where she re-connects with a ninth-generation medicine man and meets Felipe (Javier Bardem) who helps her to believe in love again. I know what you're thinking. Or at least, I know what you should be thinking if you're not the kind of sappy mainstream dolt I avoid at all costs. You're thinking "Wow, the combination of that plot and Julia Roberts sounds like the kind of cloying crap that Hollywood spews at the Oprah crowd like it was a free key chain". In addition, you might be wondering what a snarky, cynical bitch like myself thought of this film. Well, it might be that I'm knocked up and all, but I liked this movie. I said it.
Eat, Pray, Love is thoroughly infused with Elizabeth Gilbert's voice as a writer, and she is good. Candid, unapologetic and blessed with an ability to make trite topics sound fresh, Gilbert possesses a unique quality lacking in most contemporary writers. Director Ryan Murphy and Jennifer Salt adapted Gilbert's book for the screen and held on to her style well while making the story more filmic. Murphy also makes the most of his lush locations by giving so many wide shots of Rome and Bali that you are practically able to smell the pasta and jasmine. Although, to be fair, during the India portion of the trip you can really only smell the cow shit.
There are three brilliant character actors in Eat, Pray, Love who threaten to take over every scene they share with Roberts. Billy Crudup (Almost Famous), Viola Davis (Doubt) and Richard Jenkins (The Visitor) play Gilbert's husband, editor and mentor respectively, and they are all excellent. James Franco (Spiderman) plays Gilbert's lover and he is disappointingly whiny and uncharismatic. Now, to Roberts herself. I know why it kills me to admit this. I'll get to that later. Roberts is worth every penny of her 20 million dollar salary. Seriously. She has not one false moment in this movie and she carries it expertly. As Elizabeth Gilbert, she is unafraid to be unlikeable at those moments when her character is experiencing a particularly self-involved episode. This is highly difficult for most actors, especially famous ones who have made entire careers from being likable. Roberts is vulnerable without the usual display of tears and knows how to take the audience along on her quest without being preachy. Don't get me wrong; there is a scene in Italy when Roberts and her cohorts practice the Italian style of gesticulation where I wanted to gnaw her face off, but...
The reason that I hate to admit the adroitness of Roberts' performance is that she is nearly universally loved. Most people love her, which is precisely why people like me (who never want to be lumped in the category of "most people") abhor her appeal. It is however, tough to ignore that in the last twenty years, Roberts has consistently delivered good and sometimes great work (Charlie Wilson's War being the notable exception). Roberts' attitude off-duty is always putting me off, and her having achieved the highest level of fame makes it difficult to separate Roberts from her characters. But within the first few frames of her films, Roberts manages to convince that she is not the broad who gushed on Oprah about her "remarkable, that is, he is to be remarked upon" husband. My Comment is about those of us who fancy ourselves non-conformists and how much we lose out on when we deliberately ignore certain entertainment simply because it is popular. When I was young, I'd sit in my bedroom listening to Morrissey and Elvis Costello, assuming that I was among a handful of like-minded souls who would never deign to get into the Top 40 scene. Later, I rejected all mainstream movies, feeling that independent directors and writers were the only ones who could speak for me and my ilk. A book or movie becoming a smash success was the ultimate insurance that I'd never read or see it, and it was pointless to try and convince me otherwise. This behavior is not unique, particularly for the precocious teen . But when that attitude stubbornly gets carried through to adulthood, some very real things begin to happen. First you become an asshole. Worse, a pretentious asshole, which is the worst kind. You become so concerned with not sounding like a Philistine, that you end up sounding like a, well, a pretentious asshole. Most importantly, you miss out on things that you might have loved, but wouldn't experience because you were so afraid of being ordinary. That's really the crux of it. PA's are so afraid of being ordinary that they start to say things like they won't go see music played in large venues, or cannot possibly read the new book by a bestselling author. But unless the PA is either a hermaphrodite or a billionaire, he is doubtless pretty ordinary. Guess who's not ordinary? The fucking bestselling author. So deal with it and go Netflix Forrest Gump. It's really good.