This review first appeared in The Colorado Springs Gazette. To read this review at its original source, click here.

My biggest fear with Eat Pray Love was that, as with so many adapted works of a more intimate, interior nature, it would be Hollywood slick, over-produced and about as subtle as a bull in a china closet. Thankfully, my concerns were unfounded. The film, which admittedly stumbles in the home stretch and just misses out on something like greatness, is nonetheless a visual and metaphysical delight. Come hungry, come searching, come lonely.

Liz Gilbert (Julia Roberts) is living the American dream—she is a successful travel writer, married to a man (Billy Crudup) who loves her, surrounded by friends (Viola Davis) and ensconced in a wonderful house—so why is she so miserable? Existentially lost and profoundly confused, Liz decides to leave her marriage and strikes up a relationship with a younger man (James Franco) only to find the cycle repeating itself all over again. She is the broken element, not her relationships. Cognizant of the fact that her life lies at the crossroads, Liz desperately decides to take a year abroad to find herself, abandoning her comfort zone for what she would eventually dub the physics of the quest. She seeks culinary hedonism in Italy, spiritual enlightenment in India and, unbeknownst to her, balance and true love (Javier Bardem) in Bali.

Most of the time we don’t go into life in bad faith, but that doesn’t change the fact that life rarely meets our expectations. We rarely, if ever, meet our own expectations. In the beginning of Eat Pray Love, we are not sure if Liz is running from or toward her problems. Neither, it is truthfully said, does she. Her discoveries are our discoveries. At its heart, Eat Pray Love is a film about yearning—yearning to change not one’s circumstances, but one’s self.

There is no special, marketable charm to Liz’s travel itinerary. This isn’t about geography. Instead, it is a willingness to find meaning not in any sort of spiritual destination (the religious practice is all the same, just with different magic incantations), but in the ups and downs of the journey…to admit, as Liz does, that “ruin is the road to transformation.” She discovers more than just what’s truly important in her life, she discovers herself. Trite and cliché? Certainly. But how many of us truly know ourselves? How many of us, in our 21st century, warp speed, multi-tasking society have ever sat still in silence long enough to ever really get to know ourselves, much less another person. And how much better would our lives, our loves and our world be if we did?

Some have complained that Gilbert’s memoir is New Age narcissism, a Western fetishization of Eastern thought about which you could see every false, self-conscious moving part. Such is the danger anytime any piece of art from one predominantly religious culture addresses another. Still, the complaint is certainly not without merit, though the film does much (though not enough) to smooth off those sorts of rough edges.

Eat Pray Love is only the second feature from Glee co-creator/writer/director Ryan Murphy, who officiates here with intimate flourishes and intoxicating attention to the minutest detail. It has been a long time since I’ve seen a film in which an editor, in this case Glee alum Bradley Buecker, has left so indelible a mark. The film is whimsically edited, stitched together with wit and the utmost care. And cinematographer Robert Richardson is one of the best in the biz—every frame, like the film’s star, positively glows. Roberts sells every step of her journey, every emotion, and is accompanied on her way by tremendous talents like Richard Jenkins and Javier Bardem, who humanize a story that could easily have degraded into stifling preachiness.

The final act of the overly long Eat Pray Love is the most familiar, by far the most conventional. The final act is how I feared the entire film would be (but thankfully wasn’t). As such, it leaves a bit of a bad aftertaste in one’s mouth, not because it is awful, but because it is simply commonplace. It lacks both the artistic vitality and the philosophical durability of the acts that preceded it. And yet, taken all together, the film is so rich that you feel, at the end, as if you have traveled alongside Liz, that you have changed along with her. It is the sort of vicarious enlightenment that is the rare and privileged result of losing yourself in a good book or film.

© Copyright 2010 Brandon Fibbs. All rights reserved.

Directed by Ryan Murphy
Starring: Julia Roberts, James Franco, Javier Bardem, Richard Jenkins, Billy Crudup, Viola Davis
Rated PG-13 on appeal for brief strong language, some sexual references and male rear nudity.
Running Time: 133 minutes