I finally saw Eat Pray Love this past weekend and I can’t say that I was terribly disappointed, but it did occur to me that if I hadn’t read the book, I might have been. The primary point of the movie was left out, as a couple of the Yahoo movie reviewers previously noted, and Liz Gilbert seemed like an insanely confused white woman on the verge of something incredibly stupid. Like, she’d lost her entire mind and would, at any moment, be committed to a mental institution. She didn’t read like that in the book, though, unless I read it wrong, lol. To me, she came across in the book as someone who was tired of living the way society felt she was should live. She wasn’t happy with her marriage, which only came about because it was expected of her by others. And, in order to get over the disappointment of her failed marriage and subsequent divorce, she jumped headfirst into what promised to be a disastrous relationship with a younger man. Eventually, she decided that the best way to pull herself out of the muck she had created was to get as far away from it as possible. The first stop being Italy, where she let go of herself and her waistline, happily overindulging on good food. She used food as a healer in Italy, then came prayer and discipline in India, then practicing being balanced and content in Indonesia, where she stumbled on love. Eat Pray Love. Well, the movie crammed all of that together so that it wasn’t as coherent as it was in the book. I’m sure it must be difficult to translate words and emotion into action without subtitles or a narrator (or maybe I’m just providing excuses for Brad Pitt). Under the Tuscan Sun was able to do this by simply including the heroine, Frances Mays, as narrator throughout the film. But Brad Pitt, who directed “Eat,” and whoever wrote the screenplay didn’t pull it off.
Fortunately, I knew exactly what was going on at all times because I had read the book and the movie followed the story to a T (except for the ending, but I'll get to that). But my movie buddy was lost and bored. For instance, in the book it is explained that Ketut Liyer, the old Indonesian medicine man, doesn’t speak English very well so he confuses the greeting “Good to see you” with “Good to MEET you,” instead. So the viewer is left thinking that this old man has no idea who Julia Roberts is and forgets her every time she leaves him. Julia Roberts sucked, by the way. But Javier Bardem and the guy who played Richard from Texas (his name escapes me) were great. If you go see this movie not having read the book first, you will be left wondering what the flipping point was, or how she could afford to just get up and live abroad for a year “finding” herself, after giving away all of her possessions and money in her divorce. And speaking of her divorce, it was clear to me in the movie why she wanted one, so I don’t understand how anyone could think she left a perfectly good marriage and was being extreme and selfish. That man didn’t know whether he was coming or going. He didn’t support her in any way and was extremely fickle-minded, changing careers constantly, and then expected her to put him through graduate school knowing that he couldn’t commit and was historically unstable. It was obvious that they both wanted different things from their marriage.
The only part that I didn’t like about the movie was how they changed the most important part – the ending. They got lazy, and rather than make it clear why Liz had cold feet with Felipe, they just made her appear even crazier than they had initially. There’s a part in the book that was left out of the movie, where Liz, in so many words, says that she needed to be her own father. She was lamenting on how in India and with some other cultures, the father or parents select a spouse for their children, with their children’s input, in most cases. Yet in her case, everyone assumed that at 22 she knew what she was doing when she chose her first husband. She didn’t ask all the important questions that she imagined a caring father would ask his daughters suitor – are you financially stable, are you sane, what’s your future look like, etc. etc. She had gotten married for all the wrong reasons, and mainly because everyone else wanted and expected her to. When she realized she wasn’t happy she began to question everything about herself. Frankly put, she lost it and needed to do more than a little soul searching. So when she met Felipe, after finally forgiving herself for all her past mistakes and sadness and heartache, after finally finding balance in her life on her own and without having to give herself wholly to someone else to be complete, she was naturally a little scared. But Ketut reassured her (I won’t spoil the book entirely, lol) and she trusted herself.
It played out much better in the book, I promise. But the movie wasn’t too shabby, either. Go see it if you like watching the Travel Channel or flipping through Conde Nast. Bali and Italy look awesome :)
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