A little while ago, lets say about 6 months ago, I started to notice French macarons everywhere I looked. There were pictures of macarons in magazines, on the covers of books, and in every blog of every girl on the internet; accompanied by some fanciful quote about gathering ye rosebuds while ye may or some such nonsense. It culminated in the colourful macaron being celebrated on Masterchef and various other cooking shows. Every single direction I looked these colourful, chic, French biscuits of whimsy where stacked atop one another, taunting me.
“Here” they seemed to say “Here we are. We are the thing that you want. We represent the lifestyle you aspire to. We are light. We are colourful. We are sweet. Take some time. Eat us in the sun with boutique tea out of a delicate china cup. Eat us while wearing a frilly dress. Eat us while sitting outside a trendy café with your attractive friends and their novelty breeds of dogs. Eat us while listening to a sexy French chanteuse you have never heard of. Eat us. Indulge in us, because that is what life is about. It’s easy. There are so many of us to chose from. Oui, stop and smell the macarons, Vera”.
“Whateva”, I would scowl as I ate jam on Weetbix. Whateva.
Eat Pray Love is like the film equivalent of a colourful tray of French macarons. You can’t really fault it. It tastes good, delicious even, it looks good, it’s stylish and it’s in style, it’s foreign and familiar at once, you can’t fault a macaron – or this film, but like macarons, there is something that makes me uneasy about this attractive, bite-size representation of philosophical dilemmas and first world problems.
Based on the extremely popular memoir of Elizabeth Gilbert, Eat Pray Love is the story of a woman’s journey through divorce and emotional uncertainty; through various relationships; and through Italy, India and Bali. After realising her unhappiness in her marriage, Liz (Julia Roberts), a travel writer by profession, decides she needs to take a year out of her life to find herself. She travels to Italy where she learns to enjoy her independence, and about ‘il dolce far niente’ – the sweetness of doing nothing. In India she stays at an ashram and learns about praying and scrubbing floors. Here ‘Richard from Texas’ (Richard Jenkins) manages ready her for her spiritual awakening by basically goading and teasing her – a Texan tough-love style of self-awareness, apparently. After leaving India, Liz heads to Bali to further self-improve with a medicine man, and eventually finds her ‘inner strength’ and ‘balance’.
Eat Pray Love looks good. It’s crammed with shots of gourmet food, flowers, Indian silks and sunsets, and an awful lot of shots of Julia Roberts’s backlit, halo-like, blonde hair. (In fact, someone obviously really liked lighting Roberts this way, which wore slightly thin for me – I got it the first time). It sounds good, with some good carefully placed pop songs in the soundtrack. Roberts is warm and engaging as always, although a friend of mine mentioned the phrase “mouth like a torn slipper” before I went into the cinema and I did find that a little hard to shake. Other lead cast members James Franco, Richard Jenkins and Javier Bardem give equally good performances, with the occasional very real and touching moment from each of them. I should also note here that Javier Bardem, most famous for being the world’s creepiest dude in No Country For Old Men, transforms in Eat Pray Love into a completely charming romantic lead, but you may have to see this to believe it. My praise for this movie would lie in the aptitude director Ryan Murphy has shown in giving the right amount of space to the performers at the times that it counts. Lengthy shots at emotional moments allow us to connect with the male leads during some raw performances, but the clarity with which this connection is made is, unfortunately, incongruous with the bulk of the film.
Eat Pray Love is heavy in gloss and heavy in glitter. For a film about finding true spiritual satisfaction and balance I found the message a little hard to swallow when it was served on a bed of whipped fashion, hairdos, money, interior design and one infuriating conversation about calories and jean-sizes between the lead females. I find it hard to be inspired by characters that talk about calories.
Many movies, particularly those of the chick flick orientation*, operate on a basis of aspiration and escapism, and these will always have a place in Hollywood filmmaking, but when the premise of such a movie is supposed to be about the opposite the message seems a little trite, to put it mildly. It is a perfectly competently constructed movie, and an enjoyable one too, but Eat Pray Love presents philosophy in colourful, sugary, bite-sized treats, lined up neatly for sale, at a price only a few of us can afford.
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