Eat, Pray, Love Directed by Ryan Murphy
A Review of Ryan Murphy’s Eat, Pray, Love
This book launched Elizabeth Gilbert’s writing career, but all in all this comes across as woke white woman being privileged.
Don’t we all wish that one day, we could just run away from everything we know and start over? That’s what Elizabeth Gilbert did. She had a cushy job, a husband, the life she wanted in New York City. But then she ran away to three different countries, ones where she didn’t even speak the language, and rediscovered the meaning of life.
At the end of the day, this movie comes across as very…special. It isn’t relatable, and, in a way, it comes across as escapism. Love that it’s autobiographical, like good for Gilbert, you rock, but at the end of the day, this is a reality most people will not face in their lives.
This movie makes me so mad, because while she finding herself, she is so, so privileged to even do this. It comes across as a whitewashed fairy tale of sorts, one this reads as escapism, or even just something you’re binge watching after a breakup because you want to be this main character.
Let’s dive deeper into this review, because boy do I have a lot of thoughts.
Content / Cinematic Technique / Characters
Our main character in the movie is Elizabeth Gilbert, aka the writer herself. Thankfully, she does not play herself, because that might’ve ended tragically. Instead Elizabeth is played by Julia Roberts. As I mentioned before, she has it all in life: a supposedly loving husband, a good job as a writer in NYC (oh, the dream!), and a nice home she just bought with him. But she isn’t happy, and so, at the start of this movie, she chooses to leave it all behind. First, she moves to Italy, then goes to India for a couple of months, and then ends her trip in Indonesia. She does not speak any of the languages of the place she is going to, nor does she really attempt to learn the nonwhite languages—we see her trying to learn Italian, but the Indians and Indonesians are just kind of expected to know English. Interesting, right?
What made me very angry at this film is that it ties into the idea that one needs to find romance to truly be happy. While she has this spiritual journey, leaving behind two men she kind of loved back in New York, she finds quote-on-quote true love along the way on her journey (spoiler: in real life, Gilbert and this guy divorced a couple years ago, quite a bit after the release of this film). Why does a woman have to find a man to be considered happy at the end of the day? Why couldn’t she have gone on this journey and then gone home and realized she don’t need no man? It makes me mad about how women’s growth has to be tied into romance, like the cherry on top of this cake is a man. No, I don’t want that.
The most interesting story in this was the guy who almost ran over his child and then fled to India. But then, at the end of the day, he is trying to make it seem like India is healing. He, too, is a privileged white man being able to do this.
I also feel like that the cultures she was in were stereotypically depicted? In Italy she’s seen trying to learn the language, enjoying wine with other expats, and eating lots of pasta on-screen. But then she goes to India, which we see a young girl’s wedding, and then a bunch of shots of people praying. They are essentially stock characters, playing to the role of Orientalism that has plagued Western film since, well, Western film was a thing.
Her going to Indonesia and India are like the jokes about how people go to the quote-on-quote acceptable parts of Asia because it serves a specific purpose to them: the guise of being spiritually healing. The movie and narrative itself literally becomes a lens of looking at Asians through the lens of a white person, one in which can be damaging in the long run in regards to representation. Eat, Pray, Love is not progressive, it resorts to classic Orientalist tropes and shows us the power of narrative through a specific lens.
The filming of the movie itself was just okay. Nothing spectacular, no coloring that I loved. So, at the end of the day, the shots were basic, kind of stereotypical too when it came to culture, and so the only thought I have about that is “meh.”
Overall Thoughts
It’s worth hate-watching, not much else than that. It’s inspirational, sure, but as someone who cannot afford to do what she’s done, going to have to take a hard pass. Must be nice to already be privileged and have the money to do this, but this is not escapism I enjoy, alas. Don’t do this to yourself willingly.
