Book vs. Movie: Eat Pray Love
By Russ Bickerstaff
August 18, 2010
BoxOfficeProphets.com
And in this corner: the Movie. A 112-year-old kid born in France to a guy named Lumiere and raised primarily in Hollywood by his uncle Charlie "the Tramp" Chaplin. This young upstart has quickly made a huge impact on society, rapidly becoming the most financially lucrative form of storytelling in the modern world.
Both square off in the ring again as Box Office Prophets presents another round of Book vs. Movie.
Eat, Pray Love
At the beginning of this past decade, wealthy journalist and author Elizabeth Gilbert was having a difficult time. As it turned out, she did not in fact, want to have the child she was so desperately trying to have with her husband. So she split-up with him, got a book deal, quit her job with a national magazine and traveled to three different countries to try to find herself. The resulting book was picked-up by the Oprah Book Club and promptly became a best-seller, which has now been turned into a Columbia Pictures film starring Julia Roberts as poor rich girl Elizabeth Gilbert. How does the fictionalized film compare with best-selling autobiographical work that it’s based on?
The Book
Autobiographical works are only as charming as their authors. Being a wealthy and successful author with a reasonably interesting life that seems pretty far removed from day to day realities, it’s kind of difficult to identify with Gilbert in Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman's Search for Everything Across Italy, India and Indonesia. That being said, a great many people have felt a strong enough connection with the charm of its author to make the book a huge success. And it goes without saying that a great many people don’t find Gilbert to be all that charming. We don’t often hear that much from these people, as they are more likely to dismiss the book as an exercise in the author’s hubris. It is in the interest of giving written form to this perspective that I have decided to embark on an analysis of a book that I ordinarily wouldn’t have read. I hope to turn it into a 300 page manuscript entitled Eat, Love, Whatever: One Man’s Struggle to Understand a Culturally Beloved Book That He Doesn’t Give A Damn About. I’m hoping to submit it to Penguin Books by the end of the summer.
The book opens instantly in stunningly adequate first-person prose. Elizabeth Gilbert is unhappy. She suffers from depression, a very serious disorder that doesn’t necessarily do a whole lot to make her likeable. The fact that she’s suffering only makes her human. People can be depressed and be charming or suffer from depression and still come across as self-absorbed assholes. Gilbert proceeds to go on at some length about the fact that her relationship with her husband had been falling apart. She does so without going into specifics, which is fine. She sites the fact that the break-up is personal and also says that she couldn’t be objective about her own divorce, which is also fine. The problem with this is that she goes into a degree of detail about the actual divorce process over the course of the book, which paints her ex-husband in an unflattering light and causes her to come across as petty and juvenile. If you’re going to be traveling to three different countries with an author within her own first-person narrative, you really don’t want to feel as though your narrative guide is petty and childish. It ends up feeling like a very, very long journey…
Gilbert gets a book deal to travel to Italy, India and Bali thanks to a generous advance from a publisher who wants to publish a book about it. As few people have that kind of opportunity during a divorce, the very premise of the book serves to counteract any sympathy one may feel with the author. She eats really good meals in Italy and studies Italian. She prays in India. She spends some time with a guru in Bali. The thrust of the narrative is somewhere between journalistic travelogue and self-absorbed memoir. Neither one completely takes over the course of the book, but it’s really difficult to completely enjoy the travelogue when the author constantly interrupts to look in the mirror and it’s difficult to get completely lost in the author’s struggle when she’s spending so much time as a travel writer.
And while a great many people seem to have come to identify with the book, it’s difficult to say whether it will be remembered very well beyond the pop culture contemporary moment of the next few years (or months.) It lacks the purity of similarly inspirational works like Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance or Siddhartha. The novel is so specific to Gilbert and her problems that its overall impact and universality are compromised. And all in all, the book is really nothing new beyond Gilbert’s personal struggles. There’s a really important truism that the author seems to have overlooked. The problem Gilbert has here is common to all of the most amateurish writing, whether it be a sixth grader’s break-up poem or a best-selling novel. Any writer loves putting one word after another. The process can be quite enjoyable, but it’s quite easy to lose track of an audience.
Through her numerous commercial successes, Gilbert seems to have forgotten that Just Because Something Happened To You Does Not Automatically Make It Interesting. The big flaw with this criticism of Gilbert is, of course, the fact that enough people have found it interesting to make it a best-seller that’s being turned into a big-budget motion picture. Judging from its textual make-up, however, it seems destined to be forgotten as pop culture climbs into the next decade. Autobiographical works tend to be much more enduring when the author has accomplished something beyond the autobiography. We’re still waiting for more from Gilbert - something that isn’t at least partially self-absorbed…and, in and of itself, being self-absorbed is not necessarily a bad thing. The problem with Eat, Pray, Love is that it aggressively lacks any meaningful insight into the nature of self-discovery amongst the wealthiest people on the planet at the dawn of the 21st century. The lengths to which people go to try to find themselves can be interesting, but Gilbert doesn’t spend enough time away from the mirror to provide any kind of insight into her own experiences. As a result, the book is pretty lifeless.
The Movie
The film features 43-year-old Julia Roberts as 32-year-old Elizabeth Gilbert. Roberts has a screen presence that absolutely exudes affability. Director Ryan Murphy (who is also credited with work on the screenplay) seems to recognize this and let an audience’s natural tendency to like Julia Roberts take over. It works surprisingly well.
The script seems to focus much more on the interpersonal relationships in the story than Gilbert did, which goes a long way toward making the film more likeable than the book. The relationship between Gilbert and her ex-husband is given a bit more depth here. Billy Crudup plays her husband as an restless guy who hasn’t quite figured out what he wants to be just yet. While not without his charm, the young guy who doesn’t know what he wants playing against the successful writer falls against the screen a bit lifelessly. That being said, the interaction here is far more interesting and far less bitter than Gilbert makes it feel in the book.
The film glides pretty uneventfully through the rest of the events leading up to the three-country journey. The biggest departure here is the fact that the film makes no direct mention of a book deal. We don’t even really see Roberts’ Gilbert writing all that much over the course of the film. Appearances being what they are, this Gilbert doesn’t even really seem to be that much of a writer. She’s merely drifting along through the three countries because she wants to - not because she’s making an obscene amount of money traveling the world so that she can pontificate about it for the benefit of those less fortunate.
The film could’ve done more to merely show Roberts contrasted against the exotic locations and beautiful scenery. It would’ve played-up more of the universality of the kind of journey the Gilbert character is going on. Sofia Coppola did a brilliant job of this sort of cinema with Scarlett Johansson in Lost In Translation. Instead of opting for a more unspoken journey, the film ends up trying to exist in stray dramatic interpersonal moments throughout the journey, including persistent feelings for her soon-to-be ex-husband (Crudup,) the boyfriend with whom Gilbert had had a brief affair (a stage actor played by James Franco) and a dashing single father she meets in Bali (played by the suitably handsome Javier Bardem).
While the relations between the Gilbert character and these three men maintain enough weight to almost kind of feel like a plotline, there isn’t enough substance to them to carry the film. As a result, Eat Pray Love suffers from problems with balance that are similar to those found in the book. Too much time on the romantic end of the Gilbert character draws the film’s center away from the inner journey she’s supposed to have taken. The journey itself seems visually quite interesting, but without enough moments alone between Gilbert and the journey, the bigger aspirations of the script fall considerably shorter than they should.
Some of the film’s best moments onscreen are individual moments between an actor and the camera. Roberts has a few really interesting bits of monologue which come across in a much more compelling way than from an author ten years younger than her. Bardem has some characteristically charming moments in the center of the frame. Of particular note is a performance by Richard Jenkins as Richard From Texas - an American Gilbert meets in India. The character never seemed terribly interesting the way Gilbert wrote him - perhaps because her prose style was over-emphasizing how interesting he was. Director Ryan Murphy gives Jenkins enough space to let the character’s charm flow through his section of the narrative somewhat effortlessly.
The Verdict
Though it is popular at the moment, Gilbert’s Eat Pray Love lacks the kind of insight into journeys of self-discovery that would really make it an enduring classic. The pop biography of a rich woman from a wealthy country visiting places with more history to them gets lost somewhere between a somewhat lifeless, uninspired travelogue and a dispassionate series of journal entries. The film adaptation adds considerable charm to the narrative through focusing on the interpersonal interactions that Gilbert doesn’t seem to pay much attention in the book. Though the film has considerably more charm than the book, it still suffers from a split personality. On one hand, it’s an interpersonal drama and on the other it’s a personal journey. The two never quite coalesce in the movie the way they should. A camera has the benefit of being firmly outside Gilbert’s stiflingly claustrophobic head. Theoretically, that camera could have provided the insight into the journey that Gilbert wasn’t able to. Director Ryan Murphy does a pretty good job of bringing together all the right elements in the right order, but deeper insight is lost to those individual elements. Murphy’s Eat Pray Love is substantially less tedious than the book, but it fails to turn Gilbert’s story into a truly enjoyable film.