EAT PRAY LOVE (RatedPG-13 for profanity, brief male nudity, some sexual references): In 1946 Somerset Maugham's philosophical novel about a fellow in search of truth & the meaning in his life takes him as far as Buddhism in the Himalayas; it was made into a fine, lengthy movie starring Tyrone Power as the hero in quest.
In our dumbed down society we get Elizabeth Gilbert's gushy, psycho-bobblish autobiographical novel turned into a visually stunning film with a script create by (with Jennifer Salt) & directed by Ryan Muphy, in which Julia Roberts portrays the romantically discontented Liz, who takes a year off to find herself, first, to a sensuous glut of food in gloriously hospitable Italy (luxuriating in gelato & pasta to Mozart's heavenly music), then probes her spiritual life in an Indian ashram (with the generous aid of a fellow spirit), and, finally, to Bali in Indonesia, where true love catches up with her (thanks to a pixie-like teacher and a soul-searching man also looking for his soul mate). Her quest is completed after hopping from one "I" country to another, exposing herself willingly to the lure of what each can offer - first "eat," then "pray" and then "love."
In Rome she asks the supreme question, "Che posso fare?" (What can I do?) with the answer, "Nothing, just go with it," and that carries her to the pinnacle of her climb - after a byplay in India with fellow searcher Richard (Richard Jenkins), a Texan who "speaks in bumper stickers" - and to Bali, where also divorced Felipe (Javier Bardem) to bring fruition to her search.
Along the way we are treated to a magnificent, opulently detailed travelogue (enriched by Robert Richardson' color-drenched photography) with an extravagantly endless change of Liz's indigenous clothing from one country to the next and an equally endless sprinkling of Ms. Gilbert's philosophical dicta in a splatter of similes; she feebly matches the profound, probing words from Maugham's novel); but with a capable cast, sensitively directed, successfully at her targeted audience of mainly women, and in nearly two and a half hours comes to our heroine's equally satisfying conclusion.
This is a film you don't probe too deeply; just accept the search for one woman's need to believe in herself and its final sail into a rapturous sunset in romantic completion all wrapped up in gift trimmings, and you've got precisely what the movie sets out to be - not much more. (Grade: B-)
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