But instead of feeling happy and fulfilled, she was consumed with panic, grief and confusion.
She - and the movie - would have been better off letting the world speak for itself.By the time she turned thirty, Elizabeth Gilbert had everything a modern, educated, ambitious American woman was supposed to want-a husband, a house in the country, a successful career.
Much as Eat Pray Love is about letting go, Liz's habit of imposing pop-psychological significance on every encounter suggests she's still her controlling self. At her worst, she's like a narcissistic tour guide who invites sightseers to marvel at the spectacular vistas and cascading waters inside her own head. Trouble is, we're still stuck with Liz, who never passes up the chance to process her encounters into Oprah-fied nuggets of wisdom. In the film's travel-brochure paradise, they make for agreeable companions. She also encounters a few fascinating seekers in her travels, including a prickly old Texan (Richard Jenkins), whom she befriends at an Indian ashram and a Brazilian businessman in Indonesia, played by Javier Bardem at his most devastatingly suave. Well, as a sensual experience, Eat Pray Love falls squarely in the tradition of other femme-centered cinematic staycations, like Enchanted April or Under the Tuscan Sun, and certainly it's transporting to watch Roberts consume pizza in Naples or drift along crystalline currents off the coast of Bali. Love, Indonesian Style: While trying to recover after a messy divorce, Liz (Julia Roberts) meets Felipe (Javier Bardem), a Brazilian architect, in Bali. That's the essence of a true vacation, and she has to work hard for it. As played by a sun-kissed Julia Roberts, Liz has undertaken this adventure partly to open up to new experiences and loosen the vise-grip she's previously maintained over every aspect of her life, and the little tension that surfaces in her journey is owed to the push and pull between her itinerary - as defined by the book pitch (and advance money) that made it all possible - and her desire to feel truly unmoored and liberated. Though Eat Pray Love never loses the sour whiff of unexamined first-world privilege, its heroine does at least immerse herself in different cultures rather than expecting them to adapt to her. Therein lies the premise and the problem with Eat, Pray, Love, at least in its frustrating (and comma-free) screen incarnation: The world exists as a kind of sprawling, full-service spa treatment for the soul, neatly compartmentalized to nourish the senses, the spirit and the heart. "I wanted to explore the art of pleasure in Italy, the art of devotion in India, and in Indonesia, the art of balancing the two." "I wanted to explore one aspect of myself set against the backdrop of each country, in a place that has traditionally done that one thing very well," writes Elizabeth Gilbert in her popular memoir Eat, Pray, Love.
0 kommentar(er)
