Eat Pray Love
After a receiving a prophecy about her life in a meeting with a medicine man from Bali named Ketut (Hadi Subiyanto), Liz Gilbert (Julia Roberts) begins to question her marriage, personal happiness, and overall life direction. The end result is a decision to divorce her husband (Billy Crudup), then take a year to travel to Italy, India, and ultimately back to Bali in search of herself and balance for her soul. Along each leg of her tour, Liz is challenged and forced to make new unlikely connections, but how will she make out in her search for balance?
Based on the wildly popular book by the same title the film serves as an adaptation that manages to keep the core of the book in tact but in the same breath loses some of the book’s original charm and humor, but this is almost to be expected. From a production standpoint most of the film works, although the sound editing could have been a little better, a number of poorly recorded lines should have been addressed, but this is a mild complaint. And, from an acting standpoint, for the most part all of the leads did an admirable job, or at least a believable job. So, while there’s nothing that stands out as a glaring mis-step here, I can’t really say there’s anything that makes me jump up and down with excitement either. Hmmm, if only the film had more of a spice flavor and less of a cream of wheat flavor. Maybe a matinee but more likely a rental. Eat Pray Love is rated PG-13.