Eat Pray Love
Ryan Murphy (2010)
In the middle of the way and about halfway through the film, the heroine Liz Gilbert (Julia Roberts) has taken up residence in an ashram in India. At this point, Richard Jenkins, playing another visitor to the community, a Texan (also called Richard), shatters the torpor of the flaccid, complacent travelogue that is Eat Pray Love. Jenkins isn’t the kind of actor you would usually think of as explosive. He looks ordinary; his special gift is to illuminate ordinariness – he’s like a quieter Gene Hackman. The genius of Hackman and Jenkins is to inhabit their roles so completely and compellingly that you never think, while you’re watching, that they’re playing supposedly ‘ordinary’ people. They’re too gripping for the thought to cross your mind. In spite of his subtlety, you always notice Richard Jenkins. (When I watched There’s Something About Mary a few weeks ago, I was sure it was Jenkins in a vivid cameo as a psychiatrist but I couldn’t see his name in the cast list so thought I must be wrong. Now I see from his filmography that it was him – in an uncredited appearance.) Jenkins has the face and the skill to suggest, as soon as he appears on screen, a man who’s lived a life rather than an actor who’s arrived on set. Here, it’s soon clear that religious devotion hasn’t dulled Richard the Texan’s wits but you can also see in the eyes behind protective-looking spectacles that he’s a long way off the inner peace that he’s in the ashram trying to cultivate and recommending to others. Liz accuses him of talking ‘in bumper stickers’ and he almost aggressively agrees. The sequence in which Richard explains the personal tragedy that brought him to the ashram is, in terms of the build-up and its placing, a dramatic cliché but Jenkins’s execution of it is riveting, alchemical. His is the best acting I’ve seen in a new film this year.
Elizabeth Gilbert’s 2006 memoir Eat Pray Love is hugely popular. According to Wikipedia, it had at July 2010 spent 180 weeks on the New York Times best-seller list – and it may not be fair to assume that this adaptation, with a screenplay by Ryan Murphy and Jennifer Salt, accurately reflects the book. But the ‘journey’ the film describes comes over as a carefully and cannily pre-planned route to personal enlightenment (also according to Wikipedia, Gilbert ‘financed her world travel for the book with a substantial publisher’s advance’). Liz, after walking out on her marriage to Steven, a man who wants her to be as boring as he is, has a short-lived affair with David, a young actor who’s into Hindu meditation, and then decides she needs to go on a voyage of self-discovery, taking in Italy, India and Bali, in that order. In Rome she will eat: it seems hard to believe she can’t find decent pizza and pasta in New York but, a well-travelled journalist, she already has the idea that Italian cuisine reflects a joie de vivre she’s lost in her American life. In India, she’ll spend time at the ashram where David’s guru is based. In Bali, she’ll go back to a wise old man she recently interviewed there.
The structured scope of Liz’s quest is highly prescribed. You might think, for example, that Italy offered facilities for prayer and love-making but Liz’s stay there must be entirely food-oriented. Stage 1 will indulge her appetite. Stage 2 will be all spirituality. Stage 3 will allow Liz to achieve a ‘balance’ between the first two preoccupations. She knows where’s she going and the itinerary is designed to provide a big romantic finale as well as allow Liz to discover the meaning of life. The three imperatives of the title are so clearly distinguished that the beginning of Liz’s sojourn in a new location seems to involve getting out of her system the dominant element of the previous one: when she first arrives in the ashram, she can’t stop eating. (The visual transitions from one country to another are relatively graceful.)
If you haven’t read the book, there’s no reason to care about Elizabeth Gilbert, except that she’s played by Julia Roberts, who does just enough to remind you she’s a good actress as well as a star. Roberts’s face is becoming more remarkable as she gets older (she’s forty-three this month) and its beauty isn’t comfortable. You’re more aware of the bones and the lack of flesh gives Roberts’s mile-wide smile a rictus quality. The star presence seems intensified and exposed – it might be threatening if Eat Pray Love were less bland. As it is, Roberts’s potential to intimidate remains potential here. The movie’s blandness is frustrating – I eventually got the impression Roberts was frustrated too. There’s an engineered crisis in Liz’s romance with Felipe, the Brazilian she meets in Bali, that’s meant to give a bit of suspense to the last part of the film ahead of the inevitable happy ending. (It doesn’t.) Roberts’s anger at this point is too much – she seems to be expelling tensions that aren’t part of the character but which have built up in the actress during the languorous course of the movie. But there are also more positive sides to Julia Roberts’s maintaining her human dimension. She retains some of the qualities that made her popular in the first place: twenty years on from Pretty Woman, she still has a great laugh that still sounds spontaneous – in spite of the self-centredness of this material, Roberts herself doesn’t come over as egocentric. Because she looks extraordinary but also seems down to earth, audiences like as well as admire her. Although I drowsed from the start of Eat Pray Love and several times told myself there wasn’t a good reason for trying to stay awake, watching Roberts in a film as poor and overlong as this one – in which she’s in nearly every scene and where the woman she’s playing is of very little interest – reminds you how much you take for granted a star’s ability to hold your attention.
I was mostly relieved that the serious truths imparted in voiceover by Liz were restricted to the very beginning and end of the story but, with only these bookends, it’s hard to understand why anyone might regard Eat Pray Love as intellectually engaging. In spite of the material’s pretensions to spiritual profundity, Eat Pray Love is consistently shallow. We seem meant to be amused that the biggest crisis encountered by Liz and her dull Swedish friend Sofi (Tuva Novotny) in Rome is that, after weeks of overeating, they’re getting spare tyres (known here as ‘muffin tops’). There’s a gruesome ‘comical’ montage of their trying on new pairs of very tight jeans (and of course Julia Roberts doesn’t look to have put on an ounce). It might seem easy at least to make all that Italian food look mouth-watering but the shots come across like a series of commercials – miserably weak compared with the sequence in I Am Love in which Tilda Swinton makes love to a prawn.
The opportunities for frothy fun in the ashram are comparatively few – Ryan Murphy has to rely on the decorative splendours of a marriage ceremony to keep things looking luscious. In each of the Eternal City, Eternal India and the Balinese paradise-on-earth, there’s a fair amount of broad comic characterisation of the locals (nuns eating gelato in Rome, yattering street vendors in India, the cute geriatric purveyor of ancient wisdom in Bali). Only the vistas, shot by Robert Richardson, seem meant to be genuinely breathtaking yet they’re somehow vacuously beautiful. There’s an unbelievably ropy flashback to Liz’s wedding to Steven: she says they married too young but they look the same age in the flashback as they did at the other end of their unhappy life together. As the husband, Billy Crudup does an amusing tense dance at the wedding reception when the couple discover the band aren’t playing their song – it’s not surprising, given the crudeness of the role, that he seems even more tense the rest of the time.
The waste of good actors is prodigious. Javier Bardem has the humour and confidence to give some emotional substance to the role of Felipe, who takes over Liz’s life in Bali, although the development of their romance is mechanical. I’m pleased that Viola Davis’s deserved success in Doubt has yielded what’s presumably a bigger payday here and, considering the feebleness of what she has to do as Liz’s best friend in New York (Liz is terrifyingly organised: she has a best friend – just the one – in every port of a call), Davis shows commendable wit. But she’s wasted. So is James Franco as the young actor David. Franco seems sleepy and subdued although he’s such a taking actor that you keep thinking he’s going to do something interesting with the character. And he has a kind of believability, in spite of the falsity of the conception he’s playing. There are some less well-known people in smaller parts who emerge with credit and who would be worth seeing again in less crummy roles – Christine Hakim (the Bali best friend), Luca Argentero (Sofi’s Italian boyfriend) and David Lyons (an Australian beaut). Sophie Thompson is a woman in the ashram who’s taken a vow of silence. You end up wishing it had lasted longer than it does.
Eat Pray Love can make you feel there must be more to life than spending 140 minutes of it watching films like this. The consolation is that the gorgeous emptiness of the film makes it easier for a genuine article in it to have impact. In Saint Joan, the characters argue about whether Joan is a miracle-worker or a charlatan and the archbishop says:
‘A miracle is an event which creates faith. That is the purpose and nature of miracles. Frauds deceive. An event which creates faith does not deceive: therefore it is not a fraud, but a miracle.’
A piece of acting like Richard Jenkins’s in Eat Pray Love reassures me that I didn’t waste my time going to see the film and reminds me that real crap can contain real artistry. Eat Pray Love may be a fraud but Richard Jenkins’s acting creates faith. It’s a miracle.
2 October 2010