Eat Pray Love (2010)
Directed by Ryan Murphy
A married woman realizes how unhappy her marriage really is, and that her life needs to go in a different direction. After a painful divorce, she takes off on a round-the-world journey to "find herself".
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20 films that influenced Eat Pray Love
What critics say influenced Eat Pray Love
But if you hanker after distaff questers who are truly hot for God or wisdom or something that passes for transformative experience, buy a ticket to travel instead with Adela Quested ( Judy Davis ) in " A Passage to India " ... or Kate Winslet 's "goddess" in " Holy Smoke " ... or Nicole Kidman 's dreamer in " The Portrait of a Lady " ... or Patricia Arquette 's Red Cross Knight in the mythic " Beyond Rangoon ."
So I would be a fool to expect Roberts to walk off on her own like Ellen Burstyn did in “Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore” or Jill Clayburgh did in “An Unmarried Woman.”
But if you hanker after distaff questers who are truly hot for God or wisdom or something that passes for transformative experience, buy a ticket to travel instead with Adela Quested ( Judy Davis ) in " A Passage to India " ... or Kate Winslet 's "goddess" in " Holy Smoke " ... or Nicole Kidman 's dreamer in " The Portrait of a Lady " ... or Patricia Arquette 's Red Cross Knight in the mythic " Beyond Rangoon ."
So I would be a fool to expect Roberts to walk off on her own like Ellen Burstyn did in “Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore” or Jill Clayburgh did in “An Unmarried Woman.”
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If On the Waterfront was Kazan's apologia for singing like a canary, then Julia's late career seems an apologia for buying someone else's husband and getting away with it, for the most part, in the court of public opinion.
But if you hanker after distaff questers who are truly hot for God or wisdom or something that passes for transformative experience, buy a ticket to travel instead with Adela Quested ( Judy Davis ) in " A Passage to India " ... or Kate Winslet 's "goddess" in " Holy Smoke " ... or Nicole Kidman 's dreamer in " The Portrait of a Lady " ... or Patricia Arquette 's Red Cross Knight in the mythic " Beyond Rangoon ."
But if you hanker after distaff questers who are truly hot for God or wisdom or something that passes for transformative experience, buy a ticket to travel instead with Adela Quested ( Judy Davis ) in " A Passage to India " ... or Kate Winslet 's "goddess" in " Holy Smoke " ... or Nicole Kidman 's dreamer in " The Portrait of a Lady " ... or Patricia Arquette 's Red Cross Knight in the mythic " Beyond Rangoon ."
Stealing every scene he's in, Jenkins -- who two years ago won an Oscar nomination for his lead role in "The Visitor" -- immediately should land on everybody's short list for a supporting-actor nomination this year.
India makes for more quick connections, although the most notable, 'Richard from Texas' (Richard Jenkins, "The Visitor," "Dear John"), takes more of Liz's getting used to.
And the incidental men in the movie -- Javier Bardem ( No Country for Old Men ), Billy Crudup ( Watchmen ) Richard Jenkins ( The Visitor ), James Franco ( The Great Raid ), and Hadi Subiyanto -- liven things up a bit, so its not a total disaster.
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Cinematographer Robert Richardson's (Oscar winner for "The Aviator" and "JFK") shots of pasta and pizza, and the Italian cafes and countryside kitchens where Liz partakes, will leave you desperate for a taste; the light filtering through the ashram bathes those scenes with an ethereal glow; the lush tropics of Bali through his lens turns up the heat, though honestly with Bardem around, you don't need it.
But she's helped immensely by the scenery, which is photographed so beautifully by cinematographer Robert Richardson ("The Aviator, " "Inglourious Basterds") that if it doesn't make you want to head to old Napoli -- or at least to Andrea's -- I'm not sure what will.
EAT, PRAY, LOVE Lusciously shot by Oscar winner Robert Richardson (The Aviator , JFK ), Eat Pray Love delivers a sensory overload as intense as Inception's but heavily calibrated to stir the hearts, loins and tear ducts of women for whom love handles and spiritual bankruptcy are of equally pressing concern.
This movie about a just-divorced woman has already been made once before by another feminist, Audrey Wells, called Under the Tuscan Sun (2003), and it was almost as bad as this thing, if possible.
The work that will more obviously come to mind, however, is "Under the Tuscan Sun," the 2003 film (based on the 1996 memoir of the same name) where Diane Lane also played a writer who also got divorced and also moved to Italy to rediscover and reconnect with herself.
Diane Lane gave a much more convincingly moving, well-nuanced performance in Under the Tuscan Sun, a superior film which treads similar waters, but with a smarter script, less schmaltz and more comic relief.