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Movie Monday: Eat Pray Leave (the Theater Frustrated)


eat pray love.JPGThis weekend, Sylvester Stallone and his graying mercenary posse beat out Julia Roberts’ comeback movie, Eat Pray Love (maybe literally, if the violence is as extreme as I’ve read). The Expendables shot and mangled its way to No. 1 with just over $35 million, while Julia and her supporting characters garnered less than $24 million. The Other Guys was dethroned to No. 3.

A little sliver of me is actually relieved Sly’s gunfire won out over Roberts’ navel-gazing. Eat Pray Love, based on the real-life memoir by Liz Gilbert (played by Roberts), details Liz’s yearlong international quest to find the perfect foods, self-acceptance and spiritual balance after her divorce.

You see, at 32, real-life Gilbert was bored. Bored with her dream house in New York City.  Fed up with her devoted but unfocused husband. Tired of the “unfulfilling” but perfectly wonderful life she’d so carefully built to satisfy herself. So she escapes this (so the director would have us believe) miserable, color-inside-the-lines life. She finds and leaves a lover, divorces her husband (against his heartfelt wishes) and eats pasta and pizza in Italy until her skinny jeans groan when they see her coming. Then, after deciding in India that God lives in her “as” her, she has another affair with a Brazilian man in Bali. These two seem to live happily ever after, thus “justifying” Gilbert’s self-interested search for spiritual fulfillment and carbs.

Apparently, it’s the stuff bored women everywhere dream of, since the book was on the New York Times best seller list for years, not months. And it’s reported that hoards of disappointed middle-aged ladies have followed in Gilbert’s international footsteps looking for their own extrication from “misery.”

Let it be known: I really wanted to like Eat Pray Love because I’ve done my own share of world travel and soul-searching over the years. But I left the theater irritated because Gilbert’s spiritual and emotional trek was all in the name of herself, not God or others. Rather than seeing the adventurous heroine that Columbia Pictures wanted me to see in Gilbert, I saw a self-absorbed quitter who inconsiderately broke hearts and vows.

I doubt The Expendables is much more redemptive than Eat Pray Love, but at least there’s not as much needless angst involved.