Eat Pray Love, then Cop Out

A commentary with spoilers

I believe that – if you are serious about a life of writing, or indeed about any creative form of expression – that you should take on this work like a holy calling. I became a writer the way other people become monks or nuns. I made a vow to writing, very young. I became Bride-of-Writing. I was writing’s most devotional handmaiden. I built my entire life around writing. I didn’t know how else to do this. I didn’t know anyone who had ever become a writer. I had no, as they say, connections. I had no clues. I just began.

— Guess Who?

Eat Pray Love (IMDB) went on, say, five minutes too long. Oddly enough, as I understand matters, the final ending, the unnecessary one, the unconvincing one, the Hollywood one, is also, I understand, the one most true to the life. For the movie is based on a memoir (oh those pesky but ever popular memoirs!) by Elizabeth Gilbert (played in the movie by Julia Roberts), and is about a year she spend looking for herself in Italy, India, and Indonesia. Apparently she found herself.

And she also found a man. In the movie he’s Felipe, a Brazilian expat in the import-export business (played by Xavier Bardem). In real life, so a subsequent memoir tells us (reviewed in The New Yorker), he’s a gem trader. And Liz ended up having to marry him. From that I infer that Gilbert ends up in his arms, so to speak, at the end of the memoir on which Eat Pray Love is based.

But the movie would have been better without that ending. About five minutes from the ending we have a scene where Felipe asks Liz to go away with him to an isolated island for a few days — at this point their affair was a couple of weeks old. In the most powerful scene in the movie, she refuses, saying that it would upset the balance she’d worked so hard to achieve. She walks away.

Critical note: Yes, a powerful scene. Roberts’ best acting in the film, it was startling. But it’s more than the scene. The film was obviously calibrated so that this would be the most powerful scene. That’s craftsmanship. Kudos to the director, Ryan Murphy.

The movie could easily have ended there. Well, not quite there, for some tidying up needed to be done. As it was, in fact, done. But giving Liz a change of heart at the suggestion of the wise old Indonesian healer who frames the whole story — that was gratuitous. It may have been true to the memoir, it may have been true to the life, but it was false to the movie that had been crafted to fit this scene.

Why? For the reason Liz gave for turning down Felipe’s little trip to a private paradise for two. It squanders her hard-won independence.

The problem, I suspect, is in the way the movie frames Liz’s quest. The movie Liz, like the real one, is a writer. But that writing is not a very prominent part of the film. It’s there, but it’s peripheral to her search for herself. Whatever she’s looking for, it has nothing to do with her chosen profession. If it had, then it might well have been possible to tell how she found a new voice in her writing and then, and only then, could enter into a new kind of relationship with a man. I suppose it would have been a bit much to pack all that into one film, but it would have been emotionally plausible.

To do that, of course, would have required treating her writing as a vital calling, comparable to Hypatia’s devotion to astronomy and mathematics in Agora. After all, this year-long trip was funded by Gilbert’s advance for writing the memoir. That’s SERIOUS advance money. And Gilbert does take her writing seriously. That epigraph up there is from Gilbert’s website. You’d never guess that the film’s Liz was that serious about writing. You’d never guess that she was serious about anything but, well, finding herself.

One can indeed find oneself in writing pursued at a high level of intensity. That is, one can transcend oneself and become immersed in a larger world. Without such transcendence finding oneself is just, well, finding oneself, whatever that is:

Hi, Self, how ya doin'?

Not bad, Self, and you?

Not bad at all, not bad at all.

Well, then, since we’re not bad, you and me, not bad at all, let’s talk about self-discovery.

OK. Um, err, how do we start?

Not much drama there, nor wisdom either. And that’s the problem with this film. There’s nothing at the core. And that means that, for Liz, finding herself can only mean NOT becoming absorbed into a man.

Well, if that’s what it means, and if the movie’s about a woman finding herself, then it should have stuck by its guns and ended when Liz declared her independence from Felipe. As it is, it’s just one more film in which the meaning of a woman’s life is found in the arms of Prince Charming.

Why not try giving the woman something to do with her life? Why not try being true to Gilbert’s vocation and taking writing seriously? A woman who’s SERIOUS about writing? There’s been many — Sappho, Murasaki Shikibu, and Aphra Behn come to mind. No daring required. Just a little more honesty.