Eat, Pray, Love

Eat, Pray, Love
a Journey for “Love”

Release Year: 2010
Distributor: Columbia Pictures
Director: Ryan Murphy
Producer: Brad Pitt / Dede Gardner / Jeremy Kleiner / Julia Roberts / John Hardy
Screenplay: Ryan Murphy / Jennifer Salt
Cast: Julia Roberts / Javier Bardem / Billy Crudup / James Franco / Viola Davis
Music: Dario Marianelli
Cinematography: Robert Richardson
Editing: Bradley Buecker
Budget: $60 million
Duration: 134 min

The story is based on a novel with same title written by Elizabeth Gilbert who was inspired by her own journey. Gilbert (Roberts) was a career woman, has to be failed in her marriage with Steven (Crudup). She felt something had been lost in her life, then she made a relationship with a theatrical performer David, but it did went badly. Gilbert finally decided traveling around the world seeking for her lost identity, through Italy, India, and Indonesia.

We had already seen this kind of plot in other similar movies. Usually the main character learned something from her experience that she met in her trip, until she finally found what she had been looking for. Into The Wild, a movie directed by Sean Pean is a perfect example for this kind of theme. As if she was running off from reality and looking for peacefulness. She did the best effort for it, from eating many delicious foods, meditation, until having sex. It completely did not tell us how her trip was able to reflected what she was looking for, for instance her trip to India. It even had the same ending with others similar movies.  In a word, it was a superficial story.

Apart from that, Roberts was giving her best acting. Instead, it seems that Eat, Pray, Love did not exhaust her for taking all out of her talent. Bardem, Crudup, and Franco were acting good, but not tremendous. Bardem almost appeared alike with his Role at romance film, Vicky Christina Barcelona. On the contrary, actor from our country Hadi Subiyanto steal our attention playing a role as Ketut Liyer. While our best actress, Christine Hakim only had minor character so that she could not showing her best talent in acting. However, it was a pride seeing an actress from our country played with Top-actress Julia Roberts.

One thing really interesting in this movie, it felt as if we were truly traveling to Italy, India and Indonesia. The best sequence was in Italy, revealed the exoticism town to town in Italy from the architecture, foods, hospitality even their accent. Although the sequence in Bali was long enough, but it did not show the exoticism of Bali, it because the director avoiding hustle at the main sights in Bali. Exactly, Eat, Pray, Love is just an ordinary drama movie showing the exoticism some countries. This movie was not offering something fresh.

M. Pradipta

Assistant editor and senior writer at Montase, and movie lovers