Pretty Woman With an Appetite

Eat Pray Love

Directed by Ryan Murphy

Runtime: 133 min.

It’s been 20 years since Julia Roberts negatively revolutionized movie culture in Pretty Woman. That was a Garry Marshall film, but Roberts’ screen-sized grin was what sold its fairytale—a Hollywood confirmation of Madonna’s then-popular feminism-as-whoredom ethos. Playing a hooker who denies that she is one predated Clinton’s self-serving pragmatism and won Roberts movie-star status. Romantic comedy has never been the same. Roberts’ new rom-com, Eat Pray Love, is for moviegoers of the Clinton generation who think of romance as a profitable venture.

Turning Marshall’s warped sentiments into new millennium philosophy, Eat Pray Love is essentially a celebration of the luxuries Hollywood encourages viewers to feel is their entitlement. As recently divorced New York magazine writer Liz Gilbert, Roberts sojourns to Italy, India and Bali, exhibiting all the freedom to travel the world and coddle one’s love life that money can buy.

Roberts’ move from materialist fairytale to New Age self-seriousness takes the form of a three-stage spiritual search: Appetite, Assessment, Reward. In Italy she displaces her erotic frustration by awakening her previously ignored gastronomic sensuality. At an ashram in India, she meets a grieving American father (Richard Jenkins) who teaches her patience and forgiveness. In Bali, a guru/matchmaker brings her in contact with a divorced Brazilian (Javier Bardem) looking to love again.

All this is Liz’s process of self-validation. Even when she befriends a Balinese holistic healer (and single-mother)—then arranges an $18,000 fund to build her house—the charity is a another display of Liz’s middle-class worthiness. Throughout, Liz takes for granted her lifestyle of choice and liberty; it has allowed her to easily enter then quit a marriage (to Billy Crudup) without commitment or certainty. What’s assuredly presented about her life is a casualness that ignores any sense of obligation: She’s carefree about her drives and ambition. Her existential state only matters when a guru offers fortune-cookie prophecy about money.

Eat Pray Love resembles the 1950s traveling bachelorettes rom-com Three Coins in the Fountain but pretends spiritual exploration. TV conceptualizer Ryan Murphy attempts cinematic significance through a touristy account of Liz's changeable whims, but his images and drama are TV—shallow. Murphy fails to connect emotional longing to the immanence of place and space as David Lean did so masterfully in the 1955 Katharine Hepburn spinster drama Summertime. It’s curiosity about her future that sparks the search for meaning that Liz previously avoided. Getting “closer to God” translates as “discuss my relationships.” After divorce, she first falls for a yoga-practicing actor (smirky James Franco), who conveniently proposes a fashionable mode of spiritual exoticism.

This is post-Judeo-Christian, but very Hollywood. Liz’s search never includes typical Western religions. Her meditations are moments of stressful impatience. Like the pampered heroine of Lost in Translation, traveling to new places doesn’t even put her in a contemplative or awed state of alienation. Liz’s semi-epiphanies (mainly over food) belong to a new religion of narcissism: Oprahtology.

Murphy calculates universal significance here the way his loathsome Running with Scissors calculated feminist-queer self-pity. Both come together in Oprah-like life-lessons epitomized in the odd beach seduction where Liz turns down an Aussie’s advances while Murphy’s composition fixates on the young man’s bare ass. It derives from the stealth-gay pseudo feminism Pauline Kael pointed out in George Cukor’s 1981 Rich and Famous. Such subjectivity (as Liz’s and Murphy and Oprah) is really a sign of our culture’s rich and famous narcissism.

And so Eat Pay Love misconstrues spirituality as self-fulfillment. “I do not need to love you to prove I love myself,” Liz barks at Bardem during a moment of indecision. Oprah-talk as gospel. So is “God dwells in me as me,” which contradicts Liz’s humble Thanksgiving-in-Italy address that now looks like a traditionalist twist on [I Am Love]’s queer critique of family. If you think about it, Eat Pray Love doesn’t advocate for greater sensitivity, it simply commodifies the idea of spirituality. Its three stages are part of Roberts’ latest big sell (like three Julia movies to make up for her recent missteps) and as long as each Sex and the City franchise film. Pretty woman, now of a certain age with a tiny blemish under her eye implying a permanent self-pitying tear, suggests Carrie Bradshaw’s big sister who’s a lousy tourist and with an old-maid’s fashion sense.