Print edition: 
“Eat Pray Love” may be about a journey, but it’s a carefully charted one.
It certainly pulls all the emotional strings, and its job is to wear its heart on its sleeve. But director Ryan Murphy (TV’s “Glee”) carefully navigates waters that get dangerously close to schmaltz.
He mostly steers clear of it, thanks to his star Julia Roberts, in a thoroughly engaging, robust performance.
Murphy and Roberts clearly have a respect and admiration for the film’s source material, the phenomenally successful memoir by Elizabeth Gilbert. As portrayed here by Roberts, Gilbert is an affluent woman who seems to have it all — successful career, handsome husband (Billy Crudup), beautifully expansive home — except a family.
So she’s unhappy, apparently with her empty marriage, and is in “real trouble” — we know this because she tells this to God in her first-ever prayer. So she gets divorced, and it’s an understandably painful process.
Liz then wanders into the arms of her rebound guy, a struggling actor (James Franco), and things don’t go well there, either.
She’s smothered, see — been in relationships “since she was 15” and has never really gotten to know herself. So, now, it’s time.
She decides to take a yearlong sabbatical from her job (must be nice) and travel the world, first going to Italy to rediscover her taste for food. There, she meets a group of friends and has a great time eating, gaining weight and buying new jeans. It’s all part of discovering “pleasure,” which in Italy is the art of doing nothing.
Liz then moves on to India to study prayer. But the bubbly feeling she had is soon lost, as she doesn’t understand the spiritual connection that everyone else is making.
She meets crass, crusty “Richard from Texas” (Richard Jenkins), who tells her to “do her work,” and she eventually makes a higher connection in a friendship with a young woman succumbing to an arranged marriage.
Liz then ends up in Bali, where she meets Felipe (Javier Bardem), who has some emotional scars of his own. Eventually, romance blossoms.
Mostly, the film is spare on cheap “awww” moments — it mainly tries to really invest in the characters’ journeys and aim for true discovery. The cast gives it their all.
It also helps that the film is so vast, setting this woman’s inner plight against an expansive, worldly backdrop. It reminds us how small our problems really are in the grand scope of the world — or, rather, it should remind us.
Because at any other time, Liz might be described as self-absorbed, pouty and spoiled. She may be searching for inner peace, but we’re not offered any real reason for her lack of it (say, from hardship or abuse).
There are also moments that unfortunately are too reminiscent of “Sex and the City,” with Roberts narrating her thoughts and a close-up of a computer screen spelling them out. We’re almost waiting for a rhetorical pun.
But thankfully, Roberts brings the film above all of this. She humanizes Liz’s plight with detailed, expressive emotion. She absolutely holds it all together, giving the film its touchy-feely heart, and soars.
“Eat Pray Love” definitely — understandably — has a female perspective. Regardless, it’s a surprisingly restrained, well-intentioned, nice experience (and will remind some of their own travels, as it did me of mine).
Because it’s all about the journey, and as “Eat Pray Love” points out, that is different for everyone. As long as it ends with a sunset.
REVIEW
“Eat Pray Love”
Three stars
Rating: PG-13 (appeal for brief strong language, some sexual references and male rear nudity)
Starring: Julia Roberts, Billy Crudup, James Franco, Richard Jenkins, Javier Bardem
Directed by: Ryan Murphy
Showing at: Chisholm Trail 8 (Newton), Derby Plaza, Movie Machine, Northrock 14, Warren Old Town, Warren Theatre (east and west)
