Faith-Family Film Review: Eat Pray Love
By Catholic Office of Film and Broadcasting
Eat Pray Love—Off-kilter values underlie this fact-based narrative of a travel writer’s (Julia Roberts) self-initiated divorce (from Billy Crudup), brief affair with a much younger actor (James Franco) and yearlong quest for enlightenment and self-understanding via Italian cuisine, Hindu spirituality (under the guidance of Richard Jenkins) and romance with a Brazilian expatriate (Javier Bardem) living in Bali. Director and co-writer Ryan Murphy’s overlong, ultimately exhausting screen version of Elizabeth Gilbert’s best-selling 2006 memoir displays an ambivalent attitude toward marriage, ignores Christianity as a source of insight and revolves around an interminably navel-gazing central figure. That figure, along the path of her pampered pilgrimage, confuses psychobabble for wisdom. Complex religious themes, acceptability of divorce, nonmarital and premarital situations, rear nudity, some sexual humor, an obscene gesture, a few uses of profanity, at least one rough and a half-dozen crude terms. L — limited adult audience, films whose problematic content many adults would find troubling. (PG-13) 2010
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