Critics’ Consensus: Nothing happens in Eat, Pray, Love.
It’s the intelligent film reviewers’ consensus. The majority of sensitive, insightful, kind and forgiving international film critics agree: Everything that made Elizabeth Gilbert’s Eat, Pray, Love a runaway best-selling book contributes to making it a monumentally boring movie.
The book’s premise appeals to every woman’s heart. Writer Liz Gilbert yearns for something breath-taking, and she longs for enlightenment and fulfillment. Her successful career and ostensibly happy marriage have betrayed her. She takes a leave-of-absence from her regularly scheduled life already in progress, and she travels around the world—eating and praying as you might expect. In the end, she finds inner peace and exotic love. The premise and plot require sixty-seven words. Gilbert’s intimate, confessional, conversational, wry, Julia Roberts-voiced style carries the book through very long periods between big action scenes. Fine for a brilliantly written book. Impossible for a movie, no matter how well scripted, produced, directed, and filmed. Haydenne Beaumont, film-maker in residence at Patterson-Forbes Partners , sums-up, “Nothing happens. Movies are supposed to move. In this movie, nothing moves, and even less happens.”
Julia Roberts returns to the screen with her power, charm, and charisma running in the red zones. No one could play this part with greater understanding and empathy than Roberts. Roberts’s skill combined with Ryan Murphy’s “pretty” film-making go a long way toward redeeming the movie. Still, when the critics use the word “contemplative,” they use it as a euphemism for snooze-fest. The picture runs 133 minutes, approximately as long as it takes to read the book, and with far less reward. In order to compress the action and therefore increase the audience’s engagement and passion for the author’s cause, Murphy easily could have scaled back to 90 minutes.
Haydenne Beaumont concludes, “Murphy and company could have made far more money and done far more justice to Gilbert’s novel if they had used far less film.” Beaumont laments, “It’s a sin of excess. They used too much good stuff. Like a curry with too much spice, instead of teasing and delighting, it just numbs.”
