BEFORE: Julia Roberts carries over from "Mona Lisa Smile", and I suppose that I've managed to avoid this film for long enough. It was released almost nine years ago, and just think, when I started my blog in 2009 this film hadn't even been RELEASED yet, so I avoided it during its theatrical release, then its release on home video, release on premium cable, and it's probably become a staple on commercial stations by now, though with its 2 hr and 13 min. run time, maybe not. The lesser stations love those 90-minute romances that they can stretch out to 2 hours with commercials. Anyway, I caught it last year when it returned to premium cable, and burned it to DVD with "Mona Lisa Smile". I'm still catching films on premium cable that I missed in years past, like I just recorded "The Grifters", and a film like that, I want to say that maybe I've seen it, only I don't specifically remember doing so. Well, on to the Watchlist it goes, then. I've maintained the Watchlist at 155 films for what feels like months, though of course the secondary Watchlist (films I'd like to add to the watchlist, plus what's available on Netflix and Academy screeners) is always hovering around 200 additional titles.) Maybe I should increase the Watchlist to 160 films, just to speed things along - plus that's a nicer, rounder number.
THE PLOT: 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".
AFTER: Oh, I really wanted to hate this film, and I'm not saying I didn't (not yet, anyway) because I imagined that it contained the biggest, most pretentious platitudes about how one should live one's life, coming from a well-connected, privileged white writer. Did you ever realize how many films center on writers? How many books, too - I guess since all those books and movies are written by writers, the easiest cop-out is for writers to write about themselves, or people sort of like them, because they believe that their experiences are somehow going to contain some universal magic advice that the rest of us are starving for. Oh, please, magic writer, tell me what I'm doing wrong in my life, I need your help! Give me a break. If you really wanted to flex those writing muscles, you'd write a story about a guy who works in a factory or is a janitor or something, and if that sounds boring, well, it's your job as a writer to find a way to make that interesting, isn't it?
But I'm going to let this slide for a minute and let a writer write a story about what it means to be a writer, a travel writer in this case. So she travels around on the company's dime, and she's still not happy. She's married to a man who's really into her, only she's not happy. She lives in NYC, the capital of the world, has a good job, good husband, gets to travel and she's still not fulfilled. So, instead of trying to figure out how to GET happy and fulfilled, instead of getting a hobby or seeing a therapist, it's somehow easier for her to tear down the life she's built for herself, divorce her husband, and go off on a year-long trip around the world. All because an old, wise man in Bali read her fortune once, and told her she would lose all her money, have one short marriage and one long one, and someday return to Bali and spend several months there.
Apparently, she never heard of a self-fulfilling prophecy, which is where the fortune teller gets so inside her head that she (either consciously or unconsciously) takes steps to make the prediction come true. When she finds herself at odds with her husband, just because he can't seem to land on a solid career, and then wants to go back to school, she thinks, "Ah, this is how I'm going to lose all my money, paying for his college courses..." (So how come SHE'S allowed to go around the world to find herself, but he's a bastard for wanting to go back to school? ). His other crime is that he doesn't want to go to Aruba with her - how dare he, what a terrible person he is. She should divorce him right away because he doesn't like tropical beaches or island paradises! Ironically, since he doesn't want a divorce (again, what a bastard...) it ends up costing her all of her money to get rid of him. At this point, I wondered if it would have been cheaper just to pay for him to go back to school.
Anyway, take it from me, there were probably a dozen or so better ways for her to handle her clingy husband if she truly wanted a divorce. Her character is so blah and lifeless that she doesn't even know how to break up with someone properly. Geez, maybe he's still stuck on her because she hasn't given him enough of a REASON to want to end the marriage, instead it's just sort of a "I'm not feeling it any more" kind of thing. Have the decency to give him something to get mad about, like sleep with his best friend or his brother (or sister, whichever). Then he'll get so mad that HE will want a divorce. See, the roundabout way is always best, convince the other person that they want the thing you want them to want. Or just refuse to pay for his classes, and otherwise make his life so miserable that HE will want out. Problem solved. Alternatively, suggest marriage counseling - that should make any American male want to run for the hills.
But instead she tries the rebound-boyfriend thing, which is always a terrible idea. Everybody knows you can't love a new person while you're still feeling guilty over the last one, so the new relationship with the struggling actor is bound to fail. Plus he can't travel with her, not because he doesn't want to, but because he can't afford it. Plus she feels like she's going to lose herself in this new relationship, and fade into the background of her own life again, like she did with her husband. Geez, lady, get OVER yourself already. What's it going to take for her to realize that the common denominator in all these failed relationships is herself - her spoiled, entitled self?
Now, since she's divorced and feeling down, the only way for her to heal is to visit three beautiful places - Italy (Eat), India (Pray) and Bali (Love, hopefully). But then my question is, if she lost all her money in the divorce, who's paying for this trip? Must be nice to be a rich white woman who can just get take a year off and travel around the world, right after a divorce. But, it's a terrible idea because she hasn't worked on her issues yet, so she's essentially just running away, and as they say, no matter where you go, there you are. So until she's fixed her ego and her personality, she's just going to be an awful person in a new location, and I fail to see how that's an improvement. Again, I point out that seeing a therapist would be faster and cheaper in the long run.
But let's take the three trips one by one - first we have Italy, or "Eat". I can get behind this, because the last two big vacations that my wife and I took were BBQ Crawls in the South, one was Dallas to Little Rock to Memphis to Nashville, and the other was Dallas to Austin to San Antonio to Houston to New Orleans. We've taken cruises before, and also like to go to Atlantic City, the land of the buffets (except for Vegas, of course, but we've been there too.) Instead of "Eat Pray Love" our trips are a little more like "Eat Eat Eat". So I can get behind going to Italy - I think I'd do well there, or in France, because I basically know all the words for foods and I can hold up a particular number with my fingers, plus I can point to things, then my open mouth. So if you drop me anywhere in France, Germany, or Italy, at least you know I'm not going to starve. They make a big fuss about Julia's character here FINALLY being able to order a meal in Italian - big deal, I can do that now. Ziti Siciliano, per favore, et pizza margherita, tortellini alfredo, linguini bolognese, tiramisu et due cappuccini. See? Nothing to it. I'm even better ordering in French or German.
She claims to be gaining weight eating all of these delicious Italian foods, and pretends like she has to squeeze into her jeans, but come on, this is Julia Roberts we're talking about. They're not going to sell movie tickets by showing us a chunky Julia Roberts. Nice try, she's not really gaining weight here, she just says that she is. (If they really wanted to show the results of a vacation in Italy, they should have put the actress in a fat suit, like Gwyneth Paltrow in "Shallow Hal".) But you can't eat Italian food forever (umm, unless you're Italian) so it's off to the land of curry and Tandoori chicken.
Part 2 - India, or "Pray". The character tried praying for the first time earlier in the film, when she needed guidance over whether she should get divorced or not. Umm, that's not how it works, you can't just flip a switch and suddenly start talking to God, if you've been ignoring him all your life. Anyway, most people go the other way with it, they're taught to pray when they're children and then gradually stop the practice. But that's the Christian god, and that didn't work for her, so she tries the Hindu ones. This involves her staying at a sort of religious work camp, scrubbing floors and chanting in groups several times a day. Booo-RING! She gets very frustrated here, looking for a quick fix (again, entitled white rich person...) and finds it impossible to meditate, because her mind only focuses on decorating ideas (do I even need to say it?).
She meets "Richard from Texas" who's there for penitent reasons of his own (when we finally learn his back-story, it's truly heart-breaking - possibly the only part of the movie that expresses some genuine emotional content) and keeps telling her that she's "got to do the work" and that "change comes from within" and other dime-store philosophy B.S. I don't pretend to understand the Hindu religion, with its elephant-headed gods and such - but last October we stopped at a Hindu temple outside Houston, and we were fascinated by the place. We had to endure a fair amount of proselytizing, as various tour guides told us how great the religion was, but we were mainly there to see the architecture. The pieces of this temple were made of Italian marble, hand carved and shipped to the U.S., to be assembled like a gigantic jigsaw puzzle, it was amazing. We had to take our shoes off and then we waited for the afternoon prayer service, heard a bit of the chanting and then we went to the gift shop.
But Julia's character feels she's too good to scrub floors, so she really doesn't get around to DOING the work, does she? I mean, what would have happened to Daniel-San in "The Karate Kid" if he said that waxing Mr. Miyagi's car was a bunch of B.S.? Then he never would have learned his karate skills, right? I feel like maybe I missed something here in the middle segment, or else maybe IT was missing something - like, whatever happened to that rogue elephant? Did she help get it to safety, or did it go on a violent rampage crushing villagers, what gives? What about the arranged marriage of her friend Tulsi, did that work out for the best? Did Liz ever get to talk with Corella and catch up? Which country has better Indian food, India or the U.S.? So many unanswered questions...
But there's no time to answer them, because we're off to Part 3, "Love" in Bali. Liz returns to see Ketut, the man who screwed up her life in the first place with all of his prophecies. Ketut doesn't even recognize her at first, because she's happier now then she was when she last visited. But he immediately puts her to work transcribing his Sanskrit collection of sayings, remedies (and, I don't know, recipes?) because the paper is deteriorating, and she immediately starts to figure out ways to avoid doing the hard work, like stashing a stack of paper every day in her bag and riding in to town to make photocopies. Ugh, so she learned NOTHING in India about the humility of doing hard work - perhaps the drudgery of this task was part of the lesson, why can't she understand that? And she never met a problem that she couldn't solve by throwing more money at it, so his papers end up in a leather-bound portfolio with his name inscribed on it. For some reason, he's happy about this, when by rights he should have thrown this office-supply abomination in the mud and said, "Clearly, you have learned NOTHING during your time here."
My point here is that self-improvement is a journey, not a destination. You can't just skip to the part that you think you're going to enjoy - like my movie chain, I can't just go straight to watching the film "Captain Marvel", I've got to get there my own way, and that involves hate-watching "You've Got Mail" and "Eat Pray Love", apparently. Julia's character here instead says, "Ugh, copying all this Sanskrit is going to take FOREVER, let me break all of Ketut's rules and get this done quickly so I can go find a new lover, even though this journey isn't really supposed to be about that, but yet somehow it totally is."
Problems arise because she once again feels like she's going to lose herself and her newfound sense of "balance" in this new relationship with the Brazilian businessman. But Ketut tells her that with love, it's OK to lose your balance once in a while. Boy, if she'd only known this back in New York, she could have stayed married, saved a lot of money and not wasted anyone's time. (Especially mine.) But then I guess her healer friend in Indonesia would never have gotten her own house - which, NITPICK POINT, Liz had the nerve to pay for by crowd-funding and hitting up her friends in America and Italy. It's a baller move, sure, but also a very crass one - she could have easily bought a house for Wayan herself by staying in a slightly less expensive house during the four months she was in Bali, if you ask me. The rent on that place probably cost a fortune, unless, like, somebody died in that house a few weeks before.
I suppose I figured right, because I usually hate stories about people going around the world to "find themself". You were RIGHT THERE, there was no need to travel! Can we just call this film what it really was? I suggest "Julia Roberts Wanted Three Free Vacations".
Also starring James Franco (last seen in "Queen of the Desert"), Javier Bardem (last seen in "Mother!"), Billy Crudup (last seen in "Justice League"), Richard Jenkins (last seen in "Rumor Has It..."), Viola Davis (last seen in "Fences"), Sophie Thompson (last seen in "Emma"), Mike O'Malley (last seen in "Sully"), Christine Hakim, Arlene Tur, Hadi Subiyanto, Gita Reddy (last heard in "Zootopia"), Tuva Novotny (last seen in "Annihilation"), Luca Argentero, Rushita Singh, Welker White (last seen in "I Think I Love My Wife"), Giuseppe Gandini, Elena Arvigo, Michael Cumpsty (last seen in "Collateral Beauty"), David Lyons, with a cameo from Lisa Roberts Gillan (also carrying over from "Mona Lisa Smile").
RATING: 4 out of 10 durian fruits
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