Eat Pray Love Movie Review from a Buddhist Perspective

Eat Pray Love from director Ryan Murphy should satisfy fans of his TV show Nip/Tuck. If you liked that "deeply superficial" program, you may love this deep film despite its superficial ending. This is a movie review with a Buddhist perspective on Eat Pray Love starring Julia Roberts.

The Buddhist magazine Shambhala Sun has an interview with Elizabeth Gilbert who wrote the book. I haven't read Eat Pray Love, but the film had enough insights to keep me happy.

Elizabeth Gilbert (Julia Roberts) divorces her husband rather than stay in a miserable marriage. She embarks on a year long trip to Italy to eat and India to pray. Her final destination is Bali for a rather banal love story.

The best part of Eat Pray Love is Gilbert's observations about life. She starts out describing a psychologist who worked with Cambodian boat people but worried how to relate to their suffering. As it turned out, the women mostly fretted about whether some guy liked them or not. All over the world, Gilbert encounters much the same thing with strangers harping on her for not being married but not expressing any interest in whether she's happy.

Some of the best moments include Gilbert's decision to launch where she ponders how the only thing more unthinkable than staying in a bad situation is finding the courage to leave. When she puts her possessions in storage, she muses about her life fitting in to a 12 foot room. The storage guy tells her that's what everyone says, and assures her that most people never return for their "life" anyway.

Beware of potential envy when Julia Roberts somehow affords an apartment in Rome that would cost about $10,000 a month while eating with gusto. In India, her friendship with a fellow seeker from Texas (Richard Jenkins) creates tender moments that make her quest seem less superficial. Even so, I have to say that most people will get more out of Buddhism or other traditions if they try to find a nearby sangha where you can work with a teacher for years rather than hitting India for a few months.

Bali looked beautiful but I was disappointed with the emphasis on Julia Robert's relationship with a sexy Brazilian (Javier Bardem). Still, she finds time for an explanation of "quest physics" as turning away from everything familiar and being open to every creature and every event for what it can teach you. Overall, Eat Pray Love is one of the most uplifting new movies that this Buddhist has seen recently.