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eat pray love movie review

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Eat Pray Love Reviews

eat pray love movie review

There’s some love along the way, and a little bit of praying, but it’s the “Eat” in the title that gets the most attention, like a neon sign in the window of an all-night diner.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | Oct 16, 2023

eat pray love movie review

Unlike the original source, Eat Pray Love presents a flawless caricature that's on an idyllic, hiccup-free trip in a world full of kind people who are happy to be at the mercy of this lost American tourist. [Full review in Spanish]

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | Nov 21, 2022

A never ending yawn. [Full review in Spanish]

Full Review | Jul 19, 2022

Not a good film by any means, but sometimes you need a bad film of exactly this ilk: frothy, silly and as pleasurable as wrapping yourself in a warm blanket.

Full Review | Nov 5, 2021

Without discounting the importance of Gilbert's decision... it can't be removed from its context: it's a story about choosing self over prescribed generic femininity, a world of your own making over the deeply patriarchal American upper-middle class.

Full Review | Jun 9, 2021

eat pray love movie review

Eat Pray Love is more of a romanticized travelogue, rather than a truly transformative one.

Full Review | May 23, 2021

In many ways I don't even consider Eat Pray Love a film. I see it as more akin to a very well made travel brochure.

Full Review | May 19, 2021

eat pray love movie review

This translation to the big screen is dull, boring, and largely unaffecting.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/10 | Nov 29, 2020

eat pray love movie review

Wraps it all up infinitely tighter and neater than does Gilbert's book.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.0/4.0 | Sep 7, 2020

Full Review | Mar 2, 2019

eat pray love movie review

... almost two and a half hours in which [Julia Roberts] displays her charisma... [Full review in Spanish]

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Mar 19, 2018

eat pray love movie review

With 6 million readers of Elizabeth Gilbert's memoir, clearly, the movie has big shoes to fill. It may not succeed, but Julia Roberts and the film's designers give us a lot to enjoy.

Full Review | Original Score: 6.5/10 | Dec 3, 2017

An engaging but deliberate chick flick at times, Eat, Pray, Love has the quintessential chick flick star at the helm with Roberts, who played the role beautifully...

Full Review | Original Score: A- | Sep 9, 2017

eat pray love movie review

The unexamined privilege, the idealization/exotification of all places east, the canned spirituality, the sensual goddamn spaghetti-it's all so focus-group-tested and Oprah approved and self-perpetuating and embarrassing.

Full Review | Aug 30, 2017

eat pray love movie review

Let's face it. There are some books that should never be made into movies.

Full Review | Aug 11, 2017

This gentle, meditative, well-told tale has a lot to offer.

Full Review | Mar 7, 2017

Eat Pray Love is overlong and quickly becomes tedious. It features narcissistic, inward looking characters of no interest at all and amounts to a very poorly made film.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/10 | Nov 9, 2013

eat pray love movie review

Full Review | Original Score: B- | Feb 18, 2012

Liz maybe the most unlikeable character Julia Roberts has ever had to play, not because co-writer/director Ryan Murphy is trying to make her so but because everything the film does pushes her in that direction.

Full Review | Original Score: 5/10 | Mar 21, 2011

eat pray love movie review

A seemingly interminable romantic travelogue that feels as though it takes as long to watch as the year-long spiritual quest it depicts.

Full Review | Mar 14, 2011

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Movie Review | 'Eat Pray Love'

Globe-Trotting and Soul-Searching

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eat pray love movie review

By A.O. Scott

  • Aug. 12, 2010

The double standard in Hollywood may be stronger than ever. Men are free to pursue all kinds of adventures, while women are expected to pursue men. In a typical big-studio romantic comedy the heroine’s professional ambition may not always be an insurmountable obstacle to matrimony, but her true fulfillment — not just her presumed happiness but also the completion of her identity — will come only at the altar.

This paradigm is, of course, much older than the movies, but it can be refreshing, now and then, to see something different in the multiplex: a movie that takes seriously (or for that matter has fun with) a woman’s autonomy, her creativity, her desire for something other than a mate.

The scarcity of such stories helps explain the appeal of movies like the two “Sex and the City” features, “Julie & Julia,” “The Blind Side” and now “Eat Pray Love,” a sumptuous and leisurely adaptation of Elizabeth Gilbert’s best-selling memoir of post-divorce globe-trotting. Directed by Ryan Murphy , who wrote the screenplay with Jennifer Salt, the film offers an easygoing and generous blend of wish fulfillment, vicarious luxury, wry humor and spiritual uplift, with a star, Julia Roberts, who elicits both envy and empathy.

Playing a woman whose natural self-confidence is dented by disappointment and threatened by remorse, Ms. Roberts dims her glamour without snuffing it out altogether, as she tried to do in Mike Nichols’s unfortunate “Closer.” Her Liz Gilbert can be radiant and witty, and rarely doubts her essential attractiveness, but she also suffers uncertainty, ambivalence and real anguish. The end of her marriage — to a kind, weak-willed oddball played by Billy Crudup — is wrenching before it has a chance to be fully liberating. And her rebound relationship, with a soulful younger actor (James Franco), only exacerbates Liz’s sense that she is drifting away from herself.

This may strike you as an abstract problem, and one that depends, for both its articulation and its proposed solution, on a high degree of material security and social entitlement. So many people in this world confront much graver threats to their well-being: violence, poverty, oppression. This woman has nothing but good luck! True enough, but the kind of class consciousness that would blame Liz for feeling bad about her life and then taking a year abroad to cure what ails her strikes me as a bit disingenuous — a way of trivializing her trouble on the grounds of gender without having to come out and say so.

What “Eat Pray Love” has — what the superficial “Sex and the City 2” notably lacked — is a sense of authenticity. Whether you decide to like Liz, and whether you approve of her choices and the expectations she has set for herself, it is hard not to be impressed by her honesty. The same can be said for Ms. Gilbert (to distinguish between the author and narrator of the book and the character she becomes when impersonated by Ms. Roberts). And the screenwriters, copiously sprinkling the author’s supple, genial prose into dialogue and voice-over, maintain a clear sense of her major theme. As the movie meanders through beautiful locations, grazing on scenery, flowers and food, it keeps circling back to the essential tension between Liz’s longing for independence and her desire to be loved.

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Emmys predictions, who will win, who should win — and who will own the night, eat pray love — film review.

The film never ventures, even once, into a situation that does not reek of the familiar.

By Kirk Honeycutt

Kirk Honeycutt

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In “ Eat Pray Love ,” Julia Robert’s character, Liz Gilbert, takes a holiday from her miserable life as a well-respected, financially secure New York writer, loved by men she cannot love back and despairing of her own inner emptiness. She travels the world to seek enlightenment, a journey — she never hesitates to tell anyone she meets — outside her own comfort zone. For the viewer though, it’s anything but. The film never ventures, even once, into a situation that does not reek of comfy familiarity.

Of course, the Elizabeth Gilbert memoir on which the movie is based also got criticized for its Western fetishization of Eastern thought and the overly self-conscious nature of this journey — reportedly paid for with a publisher’s advance for the book itself. None of that stopped her memoir from becoming a bestseller translated into 40 languages. So with Julia Roberts making one of her increasingly rare starring appearances and the sensual beauty of Italy, India and Indonesia as backdrop for the romanticized navel-gazing, “Eat Pray Love” should attract a substantial female audience, a demographic ill-served by the summer’s mostly testosterone-fueled movies.

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Working from a screenplay he wrote with Jennifer Salt, director Ryan Murphy, the creator of TV series “Nip/Tuck” and “Glee,” never loses track of the story’s bestseller attributes: foreign landscapes photographed at sunset or sunrise, food displayed with mouth-watering intensity, peripheral characters bursting with vitality, all men unnaturally gorgeous — or at least interesting — and female self-discovery as the unwavering central focus.

Reeling from a divorce and an affair that didn’t do the trick either, Liz tells her best friend and publisher (Viola Davis, not given nearly enough to do) that she intends to chuck everything for a year to research herself in exotic foreign climes. Everyone including her ex (Billy Crudup) and new boy toy (James Franco) pull long faces, but this gal makes a career out of thinking of nobody but herself.

Several months are spent in Rome to enjoy food and life (Eat), then off to India for meditation in an ashram (Pray) and finally to Bali, Indonesia, to search for “balance” but finding herself off-balance instead with a Brazilian divorcee (Love).

Each segment is thoroughly enjoyable in a touristic sort of way. And Roberts throws herself wholeheartedly into the role of the inner-truth seeker.

There, of course, lies the problem. One can line a bookcase with memoirs, novels and DVDs about urban malcontents discovering food and life in Mediterranean climes. At least another bookshelf could be devoted to popular entertainments where Westerners seek spirituality in the East, dating back to Somerset Maugham’s “The Razor’s Edge” if not the earlier works of Hermann Hesse. Bali is a bit off the beaten path for such self-help entertainments, but after those terrorist bombings the place could use positive publicity.

In each segment, Liz is given role models. In Rome, a Scandinavian (Tuva Novotny) and local language coach (the absurdly handsome Luca Argentero) show Liz how to embrace life through cuisine. The girls even nip away to Naples for a pizza sequence! Her Roman lesson: Don’t be afraid to attack life.

In an unnamed Indian ashram, Richard Jenkins plays a Texan who struggles to forgive himself for his alcoholic past. He mocks and kids Liz to cajole her to do likewise. Then a young girl (Rushita Singh), who dreads her arranged marriage, reminds Liz of her own unarranged marriage and its failure. Her Indian lesson: God dwells within me.

In Bali, two healers (Indonesian screen legend Christine Hakim and newcomer Hadi Subiyanto) provide Liz with medicine for her ailing soul. Her Bali lesson: If you’re a good girl, you may get Javier Bardem.

As Liz literally sails off into a sunset, you imagine that last lesson will be the one that sticks.

There is an undeniable attractiveness to all this, however doubtful the self-realization lessons may be. One can imagine whiling away pleasant hours watching this movie again as a late-night DVD or in-flight movie. The charms of each location and the vigor of the film’s supporting players cast a romantic glow. No, travel — and certainly self-realization — is never quite like this with Robert Richardson’s iridescent landscapes and loving portraits of colorful bystanders, the brilliant, exotic sets and costumes by Bill Groom and Michael Dennison and nicely unhurried pace of Bradley Buecker’s editing. But it should be.

Opens: Aug. 13 (Columbia Pictures) Production companies: A Plan B Entertainment production Cast: Julia Roberts, James Franco, Richard Jenkins, Viola Davis, Billy Crudup, Javier Bardem, Christine Hakim, Rushita Singh Director: Ryan Murphy Screenwriters: Ryan Murphy, Jennifer Salt Based on the book by: Elizabeth Gilbert Producer: Dede Gardner Executive producers: Brad Pitt Jeremy Kleiner, Stan Wlodkowski Director of photography: Robert Richardson Production designer: Bill Groom Music: Dario Marianelli Costume designer: Michael Dennison Editor: Bradley Buecker Rated PG-13, 140 minutes

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Movie review: ‘Eat Pray Love’

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If there is one constant in “Eat Pray Love,” the imperfect yet beautifully rendered adaptation of Elizabeth Gilbert’s memoir on a year of heartbreak and healing starring Julia Roberts — it is this: There will be tears.

Happy tears, sad tears, tears of relief, tears of regret, gut-wrenching sobs, really almost any variation imaginable — and that’s just the guy in the next row who didn’t think he’d need Kleenex in a movie, ever. So no need to blush if you find yourself getting teary, nearly everyone in the movie — Roberts, Javier Bardem, Billy Crudup, Viola Davis, Richard Jenkins — cries before it’s over too.

If anything, it was the crying – and the catharsis that comes with it — that made such passionate fans of the book in the first place, myself included. Despite (or because of…) all the education, the career success, the years of therapy, the rich circle of friends and family, Gilbert found herself still getting it completely wrong when it came to relationships with the men in her life. A thoroughly modern, high-class problem that turned out to resonate deeply and widely. The movie hews so closely to all those emotional colors, with Roberts breaking apart so completely and luminously as Liz, that it is likely to touch that same chord.

Just as the book turned out to be a perfect vehicle for Gilbert to work through all manner of emotional highs and lows, the movie creates space and a place for Roberts to give into wave after wave of feelings as she moves through resentment, guilt, regret, forgiveness, joy and hope to change her life.

In Ryan Murphy she seems to have the perfect director. He’s made a career of broken people, bad relationships and fractured self-esteem quite brilliantly, most notably on TV with “Nip/Tuck” and “Glee.” And yes, I know film and TV are very different mediums, but that’s not the problem here. Murphy wrings all of his actors emotionally dry, scraping to the bone to expose vulnerability, but he hasn’t quite figured out how to control that power. So this gorgeous but messy affair isn’t always as satisfying as it should be.

The film basically begins where the book does with Liz Gilbert at 30, a successful writer with a handsome underachieving husband in Stephen (Crudup), a house in a posh New York suburb, on her knees in the middle of the night sobbing a prayer to God to fix what is broken.

The answer is a divorce, which quickly turns catastrophic. Even a dreamy rebound lover named David played by James Franco can’t break her depression. So Liz sets out on a yearlong search for balance and New Age-y enlightenment: the sumptuous feast of Italy where food is the cure, the meditative Indian ashram with Richard from Texas (Jenkins) as her spiritual advisor, and the final months in Bali with the ministrations of local medicine man Ketut (Hadi Subiyanto) and a new romance with Felipe (Bardem).

Meanwhile, the canvas for all these mood swings has such a saturated beauty that it can bring you to tears too. Cinematographer Robert Richardson’s (Oscar winner for “The Aviator” and “JFK”) shots of pasta and pizza, and the Italian cafes and countryside kitchens where Liz partakes, will leave you desperate for a taste; the light filtering through the ashram bathes those scenes with an ethereal glow; the lush tropics of Bali through his lens turns up the heat, though honestly with Bardem around, you don’t need it.

But it’s not all perfection. “Eat Pray Love” was never going to be an easy adaptation given how interior a story Gilbert crafted. The book’s self-help, self-absorbed qualities, which made a publishing hit, threaten sentimental mush on the big screen, and there are times when the film comes close. A few characters have been streamlined, others have been dropped, but Murphy and screenwriting partner Jennifer Salt, stay true to the spirit and construction of the source, and that is part of what takes the film off track.

Liz’s inner voice, which drives the book, turns into extensive voice-over, which Roberts handles well enough. But the conceit of narration cheats the character development time, which would have made for a richer film. You feel this most acutely in Italy, the first leg of the journey. The film never finds its footing there — there’s virtually no connection between Liz and the cast of characters that flow into her life, and almost no story. India, however, is made worthwhile by Jenkins, an actor of extraordinary range who makes the folksy recovering Richard someone you’d want to spend time reflecting with. Bali is saved by Subiyanto, who is delightful as the smiling and nearly toothless ancient healer, and Bardem, whose potent screen presence makes anything look absolutely right for the moment.

Any time Murphy pulls away from the book, the film gets better. The scenes between Liz and her ex, Crudup’s Stephen, are intriguing and always welcome. In their flirts and their fights there is some of the crackling bite that Murphy can give dialogue when he’s at his best, and it hints at what might have been.

It helps that Roberts rides all the turbulent waves with such ease and such grace, that Jenkins knows exactly what to do with his internal churn, and that Bardem can do no wrong. It makes the many tears worth it — or at least it will for those in the mood for a good cry, and all those fans of the book who already knew to bring tissues.

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Former Los Angeles Times film critic Betsy Sharkey is an award-winning entertainment journalist and bestselling author. She left the newsroom in 2015. In addition to her critical essays and reviews of about 200 films a year for The Times, Sharkey’s weekly movie reviews appeared in newspapers nationally and internationally. Her books include collaborations with Oscar-winning actresses Faye Dunaway on “Looking for Gatsby” and Marlee Matlin on “I’ll Scream Later.” Sharkey holds a degree in journalism and a master’s in communications theory from Texas Christian University.

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eat pray love movie review

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Eat Pray Love

Julia Roberts in Eat Pray Love (2010)

A married woman realizes how unhappy her marriage really is, and that her life needs to go in a different direction. After a painful divorce, she takes off on a round-the-world journey to "f... Read all A married woman realizes how unhappy her marriage really is, and that her life needs to go in a different direction. After a painful divorce, she takes off on a round-the-world journey to "find herself". A married woman realizes how unhappy her marriage really is, and that her life needs to go in a different direction. After a painful divorce, she takes off on a round-the-world journey to "find herself".

  • Ryan Murphy
  • Jennifer Salt
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  • 436 User reviews
  • 151 Critic reviews
  • 50 Metascore
  • 2 wins & 2 nominations

Eat Pray Love: Trailer #2

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Julia Roberts

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  • Trivia Julia Roberts only agreed to film her Bali scenes on location if the producers agreed to allow her to have her family over there during the shoot.
  • Goofs Ketut, who is supposed to be Balinese, chants in Javanese while healing the crying toddler.

Liz Gilbert : In the end, I've come to believe in something I call "The Physics of the Quest." A force in nature governed by laws as real as the laws of gravity. The rule of Quest Physics goes something like this: If you're brave enough to leave behind everything familiar and comforting, which can be anything from your house to bitter, old resentments, and set out on a truth-seeking journey, either externally or internally, and if you are truly willing to regard everything that happens to you on that journey as a clue and if you accept everyone you meet along the way as a teacher and if you are prepared, most of all, to face and forgive some very difficult realities about yourself, then the truth will not be withheld from you.

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  • August 13, 2010 (United States)
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'Eat Pray Love': Have Bucks, Will Travel (To Find Self)

Scott Tobias

eat pray love movie review

The Elephant Brief: Julia Roberts stars as Elizabeth Gilbert in Eat Pray Love , the story of one woman's unexamined first-world privilege -- er, that is, her soul-searching trip to India, Indonesia and other points around the globe. Francois Duhamel/Sony Pictures hide caption

Eat Pray Love

  • Director: Ryan Murphy
  • Genre: Drama
  • Running Time: 133 minutes

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"I wanted to explore one aspect of myself set against the backdrop of each country, in a place that has traditionally done that one thing very well," writes Elizabeth Gilbert in her popular memoir Eat, Pray, Love . "I wanted to explore the art of pleasure in Italy, the art of devotion in India, and in Indonesia, the art of balancing the two."

Therein lies the premise and the problem with Eat, Pray, Love , at least in its frustrating (and comma-free) screen incarnation: The world exists as a kind of sprawling, full-service spa treatment for the soul, neatly compartmentalized to nourish the senses, the spirit and the heart. Nice therapy if you can swing it.

Though Eat Pray Love never loses the sour whiff of unexamined first-world privilege, its heroine does at least immerse herself in different cultures rather than expecting them to adapt to her. As played by a sun-kissed Julia Roberts, Liz has undertaken this adventure partly to open up to new experiences and loosen the vise-grip she's previously maintained over every aspect of her life, and the little tension that surfaces in her journey is owed to the push and pull between her itinerary -- as defined by the book pitch (and advance money) that made it all possible -- and her desire to feel truly unmoored and liberated. That's the essence of a true vacation, and she has to work hard for it.

Before Liz ever steps on a plane, events in her life conspire to do all the packing for her. Feeling shackled by a domestic situation she never wanted, Liz enters into a contentious divorce with her flaky husband (Billy Crudup), then immediately throws herself into a go-nowhere rebound fling with a young and none-too-talented actor (a charming James Franco). The book deal affords her an opportunity to flee Manhattan for a year and define herself apart from a relationship for once. Which raises an obvious rhetorical question: Is there any reason for us to tag along on her personal journey?

eat pray love movie review

Love, Indonesian Style: While trying to recover after a messy divorce, Liz (Julia Roberts) meets Felipe (Javier Bardem), a Brazilian architect, in Bali. Francois Duhamel/Sony Pictures hide caption

Love, Indonesian Style: While trying to recover after a messy divorce, Liz (Julia Roberts) meets Felipe (Javier Bardem), a Brazilian architect, in Bali.

Well, as a sensual experience, Eat Pray Love falls squarely in the tradition of other femme-centered cinematic staycations, like Enchanted April or Under the Tuscan Sun, and certainly it's transporting to watch Roberts consume pizza in Naples or drift along crystalline currents off the coast of Bali.

She also encounters a few fascinating seekers in her travels, including a prickly old Texan (Richard Jenkins), whom she befriends at an Indian ashram and a Brazilian businessman in Indonesia, played by Javier Bardem at his most devastatingly suave . In the film's travel-brochure paradise, they make for agreeable companions.

Trouble is, we're still stuck with Liz, who never passes up the chance to process her encounters into Oprah-fied nuggets of wisdom. At her worst, she's like a narcissistic tour guide who invites sightseers to marvel at the spectacular vistas and cascading waters inside her own head. Much as Eat Pray Love is about letting go, Liz's habit of imposing pop-psychological significance on every encounter suggests she's still her controlling self. She -- and the movie -- would have been better off letting the world speak for itself.