Film Reviews 
 
 Eat Pray Love -- Film Review 
 
 "Eat Pray Love" 
 
 Bottom Line: A heavily idealized journey of self-discovery with a pretty woman (Julia Roberts), pretty scenery and a pretty shallow view of Eastern spirituality. 
 
 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.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. ||||| Food, serenity and kisses  what's not to like? Absolutely nothing, that's what, as millions of readers of Elizabeth Gilbert's phenomenally successful 2006 memoir Eat, Pray, Love will attest. The high-concept structure of Gilbert's confessional story is surely a draw: After a painful divorce, the author ships off on a yearlong international odyssey to pick up the pieces of her shattered self, touching down in Italy to eat, India to pray, and Bali to fall in love. (The love part was not on the author's agenda until the irresistible Brazilian man she calls Felipe in the book, whom she has since married, changed her Indonesian plans.) But what's even more seductive than the exoticism of Gilbert's passport stamps is her ability to describe her moment-to-moment, meal-to-meal feelings with such warm, chatty, deprecating self-awareness that even her episodes of dithering, obsessing, or Where's the rest of me? boo-hooing sound kind of...endearing. On the page, Liz Gilbert comes across as a cool friend, a smart sister, a snappy pal who seems to promise, ''If I can get myself together, so can you.'' And you want to believe her. Or at least you want to chew what she's chewing. 
 
 Eat Pray Love, the movie, directed by Glee co-creator Ryan Murphy, can't muster the sound of Elizabeth Gilbert being Liz. It just can't, no matter how dutifully Murphy and co-screenwriter Jennifer Salt stitch phrases from the page into the screenplay, because the very nature of movies  images come to life, words spoken out loud  is antithetical to Gilbert's distinctive literary style, with words passed privately, silently, between the writer and her reader. 
 
 On the other hand, Eat Pray Love, the movie, has Julia Roberts as Liz Gilbert! Which is a nice choice. If anyone can make chowing down on a plate full of spaghetti look like a joyful, sensual prelude to enlightenment, it's Roberts, who offers herself as Our Julia as generously as Gilbert connects with readers as Our Liz. Roberts' relaxed gracefulness, whether she's spooning gelato, folding her long legs in meditation, or bicycling through the Balinese countryside to study at the feet of a revered medicine man, is the movie's greatest asset. Also, she wears a really pretty dress-like-the-locals wardrobe. Maybe she can travel light because she restocks her suitcase each time her plane lands. 
 
 If only Roberts' warmth, coupled with Javier Bardem's scruffy sexiness as Felipe, were enough to compensate for the folded-map flatness of this production. If only this glossy Eat Pray Love  an armchair journey for these staycation times  didn't amount to a whole lot of navel-gazing about problems that, absent the author's unique narrative language, don't nearly fill up the 133-minute space the movie version allots. A prelude establishes the disintegration of Liz's marriage (to a warring spouse played by Billy Crudup), which falls apart for reasons never satisfactorily explained (in the book, the author didn't even try  the mess just was). Then it's on to Liz's less-than-convincing pre-divorce romance (with James Franco as a  what else?  cute young actor), which disintegrates under similar circumstances of who-knows-what. And then, All aboard!, the movie chugs from country to country, port of enlightenment to port of enlightenment, with a kind of dogged, tour-group energy. Touchdown in each locale is announced via touristic world-music selections; we know, for example, that Liz is about to meet Felipe when the samba music cues up. The director also favors ambiance shots of gesticulating Italians, scrambling street-urchin Indian kids, and gentle farming Indonesians. And he falls for a tacky, chick-flick sequence (or maybe it's a fat-free-yogurt commercial) in which Liz and a new European girlfriend, bound by a vow to forget calorie counts and love carbs, try to zip up new jeans. 
 
 Under the circumstances, Roberts' scenes with Six Feet Under's (yet again) great Richard Jenkins as a fellow meditation student at her Indian ashram are almost jarring in the passionate naturalism Jenkins brings to the role  a passion that brings out Roberts' best work here. Where Felipe and the rest of the folks Liz meets are types  the handsome Italian teacher, the unhappily betrothed Indian girl, the toothless Indonesian guru  Jenkins turns Richard From Texas into a specific soul in search of redemption. Even spouting guru-type aphorisms such as ''You want to get to the castle, you've got to swim the moat'' (huh?), he's a man worth circling the globe to spend time with. The rest of the passengers? After you land, you won't keep in touch. C+ 
 
 See all of this week's reviews ||||| “If you’re lucky enough, you will find a living Guru. This is what pilgrims have been coming to India to seek for ages.” — Elizabeth Gilbert, “Eat Pray Love” 
 
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 “Eat. Pray. Fall in Love with [our] Inspirational India Tour. Starts at $19,795 per person, based on double occupancy.” — Micato Safaris 
 
 Marta Szabo’s spiritual journey started off a lot like Elizabeth Gilbert’s best-selling 2006 memoir, “Eat Pray Love.” 
 
 “I was at a point in my life,” recalls Szabo, now 53, “when I didn’t have a lot of options.” 
 
 Like Gilbert — who’s played by Julia Roberts in the movie, out Friday, based on the book — Szabo had endured a bad breakup. Like Gilbert, she was a writer in her 30s, unhappily living in New York City, unsure what she wanted to do with her life. She, too, needed to find herself. (Unfortunately, unlike Gilbert, she didn’t get a generous book advance with which to do the finding.) 
 
 READ MORE: THE ‘EPL’ MARKETING GUYS WANT YOUR GREEN 
 
 PHOTOS: ‘EAT PRAY LOVE’ PILGRIMS 
 
 Both Gilbert and Szabo discovered an international organization called Siddha Yoga — specifically, its gorgeous, charismatic female leader, known as Gurumayi. “My heart skipped a beat and then flat-out tripped over itself and fell on its face,” Gilbert writes, in her book, of the first time she saw a photo of the guru. “Then my heart stood up, brushed itself off, took a deep breath and announced, ‘I want a spiritual teacher.’ ” Both women ended up at the group’s ashram, Gurudev Siddha Peeth, in Maharashtra, India. 
 
 Getting a guru: For Gilbert, this decision was a lifesaver. For Szabo, it derailed her life for more than a decade. And for thousands of women entranced with the “Eat Pray Love” phenomenon — the movie, predicted to be a major box-office contender, has spawned more than 400 retail tie-ins — it could fall somewhere between overpriced self-help and good old-fashioned fraud. 
 
 “If you see an organization that’s personality-driven, focused on this individual leader who members seem enthralled with, and who can do no wrong, you may be dealing with more of a cult than enlightenment,” warns cult expert Rick Ross, who’s spent more than two decades chronicling the dark side of so-called spiritual salvation. 
 
 New Yorker Daniel Shaw, another former Siddha staff member, explained the group’s near-instant appeal. “Initially, my experiences were very powerful, like Gilbert’s,” says Shaw, now 58. “I was at a turning point in my own life. I was pretty unhappy. And when I encountered Siddha it was like magic — the experience of stillness, the music, the incense. I found myself feeling peaceful for the first time in a very long time.” 
 
 Szabo, who moved from those regular meditation sessions to an eventual staff position in India as Gurumayi’s personal assistant, says ashram attendees often end up broke, and broken. Rather than using their inner-peace revelations to spur them on to happier lives, they become enlightenment junkies, spending all their time and money in pursuit of what they come to believe is the path to happiness: more and more meditation and guru worship. 
 
 “People would charge accommodations and bookstore items and courses up on their credit cards that they couldn’t afford,” says Szabo, who now resides in Woodstock, NY and chronicles her ashram years at the-guru-looked-good.blogspot.com. “There was always the sense in the ashram that money you spent in the ashram — even if it put you in debt — was money well spent. The guru would handle the consequences. She would be there for you since you’d put your faith in her.” 
 
 America’s reverence for gurus is a bit of a joke in India, says Gita Mehta, author of the scathing 1979 journalistic expose “Karma Cola: Marketing the Mystic East,” in which she chronicles the first big wave of naive Westerners seeking instant enlightenment. 
 
 “People who are coming to us, by and large, think the guru is the whole idea of India,” she says. “That’s where it gets dangerous. If your guru is a con man and you think of him as a father figure, then you’re certainly going to be in trouble.” 
 
 In 1994, the New Yorker published a major exposé of Siddha Yoga, headquartered in the Catskills town of South Fallsburg. Among other things, the story alleged that the group’s leaders had covered up sexual abuse of female disciples and used “disturbing . . . strong-arm tactics used to hush up ex-devotees or punish them for disloyalty.” The group did not respond to our request for comment. 
 
 Not all ashrams are hiding dark secrets, of course. Sometimes they’re just a big letdown. 
 
 One 29-year-old Manhattanite, who asked to remain anonymous, read “EPL” when it came out, and credits it with introducing her to meditation and yoga. Years later, she says, she went to an ashram after a breakup. 
 
 Lacking the funds to jet to India, she headed to one upstate instead — only to find herself bored, lonely and mired in that depressing time between fall and winter. 
 
 Ultimately, she says, “the people there were interesting, but it didn’t have that overwhelming sense of spirituality and enlightenment that I think people associate with an ashram.” 
 
 These cautionary tales are not nearly as catchy, though, as the “Eat Pray Love” lobby, buoyed by Oprah Winfrey’s stamp of approval. The talk-show host picked “EPL” as a must-read for her viewers, and Gilbert was a guest on her show twice. 
 
 Now that the movie’s coming out, “EPL” is poised for a second wind. The message many — including Winfrey — seem to take from the book says you should spend whatever you have to and travel as far as you need to, in order to achieve happiness. 
 
 “I was wondering how many bored women will see the movie and think that the answers to all of their problems will be solved by spending a weekend in an ashram,” says 37-year-old blogger Cindy Vaughn, who recently embarked on a meditation course herself (unrelated to “EPL,” she swears). At the end of the course, she did a one-day silent meditation retreat, which, unlike Gilbert’s, did not result in a profound spiritual awakening. 
 
 “I am not sure I could do anything longer than a day,” she says. “It was hard. It was draining and long, and it didn’t solve anything for me.” 
 
 Vaughn’s candor is unusual. As Szabo has observed, friends who spend tons of hard-earned money to pursue inner peace generally try to at least pretend they’ve found it. 
 
 “I ask them how it was, and they say, ‘I didn’t have the experiences that everybody seems to have, but it’s really great!’ ” she says. “It’s hard for them to go, ‘The emperor has no clothes.’ It’s hard to expose themselves to what really happened there.” 
 
 As the industry isn’t regulated, anyone can claim the title of guru. And it’s a potentially lucrative gig, especially in a culture where we’re encouraged to pay any price to make ourselves feel better . . . about ourselves. 
 
 “It’s almost like it’s become a sport that is dependent on paying the most money to go to the best ashram, to write the most amazing experience,” says Texas journalist Joshunda Sanders, who coined the term “priv-lit” (for “privileged literature”) in a recent article for Bitch magazine about Gilbert’s book. 
 
 And it’s never been a better time to compete in the Enlightenment Olympics. To coincide with the release of the film, numerous travel agencies are offering “Eat Pray Love”-themed tours to Italy, India and Indonesia (the three countries Gilbert visits in the book). Even Lonely Planet, the handbook for cheapskate travelers, offers suggestions on its Web site for re-creating Gilbert’s trip at Roman gelaterias, Indian meditation courses and Indonesian surf beaches. 
 
 This, of course, negates the real point of Gilbert’s book: that one needs to carve out one’s own path to peace. 
 
 “It does go against the yogic principle of looking inside rather than outside of ourselves for happiness,” says 28-year-old Jennilyn Carson, creator of the blog YogaDork, who’s been chronicling “EPL” mania over the past year. “[But] people want to be happy, and if something can be purchased to facilitate that happiness, they’ll do it.”
– Eat, Pray, Love looks lovely but lacks both the spice and the depth of the best-selling memoir it's based on, say critics. Julia Roberts stars as a jaded New York divorcee traveling the world to seek enlightenment. Roberts' Liz says she wants to move outside her comfort zone, writes Kirk Honeycutt at the Hollywood Reporter, but as she journeys through Italy, India, and Indonesia, "the film never ventures, even once, into a situation that does not reek of comfy familiarity." The movie "is shameless wish-fulfillment, a Harlequin novel crossed with a mystic travelogue," complains Roger Ebert at the Chicago Sun-Times, though he notes that the overwhelmingly female audience he watched it with appeared quite moved. Roberts manages to make the "2 hours and 15 minutes of eating, praying and loving pleasant enough," writes Roger Moore at the Orlando Sentinel, who decides Eat, Pray, Love "isn’t a bad movie, just a spiritually dead one." Roberts is a great choice to play Liz but "her warmth, coupled with Javier Bardem's scruffy sexiness" as love interest Felipe, aren't enough to compensate for "the folded-map flatness of this production," writes Lisa Schwarzbaum at Entertainment Weekly.