Eat Pray Love
(M) 150 minutes, 3/5
You get the sense you're reading a book as you watch the life of Liz Gilbert (Julia Roberts) unfold before you on screen.
Her life is a complex one and each chapter explores another facet of her life and her personal road to redemption.
As a
watcher you become engrossed in her life in a different way to other movies.
Eat Pray Love could also carry the subtitle "Forget Forgive Feel" as Liz tries to get her life back on track.
There are four distinct movements in her life - the awakening that her life is not giving her what she wants; her journey to Italy to eat and forget the pain in her life; her religious experience in India and discovering how to feel and love again in Bali.
Liz had what many women could only dream of - a successful career as a journalist and a handsome husband who adored her. But life was soulless and her husband was just happy to drift through life.
Even a brief relationship with a young actor could not bring her true happiness.
Against the better judgment of all her friends, she left her life and marriage behind for a year-long search for inner peace.
Italy was all about the culture, the language, the people and, most importantly, the food.
She immersed herself and she indulged herself for four glorious months.
It was then time to tend to her soul.
Having been introduced to the teachings of a guru in New York, she sought out the guru's spiritual home in India to find peace in herself.
She struggled to release herself to meditation and realise she was deserving of inner peace.
Only with the help of hard-nosed Texan divorcee Richard (Richard Jenkins) was she able to succeed.
Her final step was to bring back the spirit to her life by allowing her to feel again. With the help of an ageing healer, Liz learns about the important things in life and, with the help of Felipe (Javier Bardem), how to love again.
Eat Pray Love is about the story and the journey.
Like a book, it is not to be assessed midway through, it is about the whole experience when you get to the end of Liz's adventures.
