Eat Pray Love | C

Brimming with scenes of beautiful places, delectable food and colorful people, Eat Pray Love treads lightly on the heavy issues facing a modern, successful woman. Director and co-writer Ryan Murphy's leisurely adaptation of Elizabeth Gilbert's best-selling memoir may disappoint fans of the book. However, the foundations of the memoir still remain.

Liz Gilbert (Julia Roberts) is still the heroine who balances professional ambition with marriage, struggling between love and independence. Not only does she try to find happiness, but she also seeks true fulfillment and a complete identity. While Roberts remains wonderfully charismatic, it is the darker, more emotional side of Roberts' portrayal of Liz that is troubling. Rather than feel empathy for Liz's struggle to find happiness in her marriage to her weak-willed husband (Billy Crudup, Big Fish), the seemingly melodramatic and sudden manner in which Liz ends the marriage appears too cold and brash.

Her post-divorce relationship doesn't garner much more compassion as she abruptly picks-up a much younger man (James Franco), and begins a rollercoaster love affair consisting of glorious highs and depressingly moody lows. Murphy falls short in developing this relationship and makes it difficult for the audience to relate to the characters' emotions, making their eventual split seem impulsive.

Equally spontaneous is Liz's decision to leave the country for a year, flying to Italy, India and Indonesia. This decision is the heart of the movie and begins Liz's search for herself. Liz defies traditional gender roles and does what many women might do if it weren't deemed socially unfit.. Many of those whom Liz meets on her trip believe she should be getting married and having children, not finding herself through travel. However, in reflecting on her earlier life, she discovers that she was always either with a man or leaving one, so the rest of the movie is her experimentation with single life.

Following the movie's title, Liz begins in Italy — relieving herself from her calorie-counting prison to feast on platefuls of delicious pasta, pizza and gelato. In India, Liz finds her spirituality in an ashram where she meets a cantankerous Texan (Richard Jenkins, Dear John). Ending the year in Bali, Liz apprentices herself to an elderly shaman, Ketut (Hadi Subiyanto), befriends a healer named Wayan (Christine Hakim, A Legendary Love), and falls for Felipe, a divorced Brazilian expatriate (Javier Bardem,No Country for Old Men). But with the feelings that Felipe sparks, Liz questions whether she is abandoning the self-sufficiency at the heart of her journey, climaxing with Liz's qualms over love and independence.

Eat Pray Loveis rife with therapeutic moments, punctuated by some redeeming scenes of good humor. Yet, this movie lacks to provoke any emotions nearly as intense as those experienced by the heroine in the book. Go see the film if you're looking to dream of exotic locales, feasts and characters, sprinkled with a modest amount of superficiality.