Through on a wing and a prayer

EAT Pray Love is a travelogue cum romance about a spoiled New York woman who abandons her loving husband for reasons that are hard to understand.

Julia Roberts and and Hadi Subiyanto in Eat Pray Love

BASED on Elizabeth Gilbert's bestseller, Eat Pray Love is a glossily lightweight travelogue cum romance about a spoiled and independently wealthy New York woman who abandons her loving husband for reasons that are hard to understand.

She then travels the world trying to find herself. I don't say the real Gilbert is spoiled -- I haven't read her book -- but the fictionalised Julia Roberts movie version certainly makes her appear that way.

The film is unusually built out of three consecutive, interlinked short stories, the theme of each corresponding to one word of the title: eating, praying and falling in love. These sections follow an extended prologue in which Gilbert announces to her corporate lawyer husband she's divorcing him. Sadly the weakness of the writing in these opening scenes is a big problem. They contain what screenwriters call the inciting incident -- the event that propels the lead character off course and triggers the story proper -- but in this case it's hard to see what bugs Gilbert at all. Her decision to leave seems semi-arbitrary and makes her appear unappealingly shallow, and by the time we come to realise there may be more to her, the film is halfway through.

Reading about the book I discovered the real Gilbert was apparently so unhappy in her first marriage she would habitually go to sleep on the floor in tears, despair from which the movie surely would have benefited. The opening scene has a Balinese healer-soothsayer informing Gilbert she will lose all her fortune (though eventually get it back). Soon she's at home, reacting with fury because her husband has announced that he is thinking of going back to studying. Divorce follows: what are we to make of that, other than she's bored with marriage and unhealthily concerned with her financial security? After a brief flirtation with a handsome young actor in an off-Broadway play she has written, the apparently wealthy writer takes off on her round-the world jaunt, first to Italy (the "eat" part: cue huge close-ups of spaghetti and pizza margherita) and various minor adventures as a tourist with a glamorous Swedish female friend she meets along the way. Then it's off to an ashram in Calcutta (the "pray" part, as I think you may be catching on). Here she befriends a divorced American (Richard Jenkins) who initially talks in what Gilbert calls, in the film's best line, "bumper sticker" platitudes, until he opens up and spills all his pain as a formerly abusive father and husband. The "love" part of the story occurs in Bali, where Gilbert returns to see the healer she encountered at the opening and meets a tall, dark, handsome Brazilian with an import-export business, likably played by Spanish star Javier Bardem.

If I began the film intensely disliking Roberts's Gilbert, I moved on to mere indifference and ended up even being moderately charmed, largely because the star finally relaxes and flashes that famously infectious smile. But it also may be because by this point the screenplay has started to make it clear that Gilbert is tortured by her inability to make her marriage work and churned up by her own flaws.

But the film never really overcomes its two overarching problems: its bitty, anecdotal nature and the fact Gilbert's journey is an essentially interior one. These things suit literature but present challenges for film that director and co-writer Ryan Murphy and his writing partner Jennifer Salt never really get to grips with. Their main strategy is to provide mentor figures with whom Gilbert can interact, but the Italian sequence -- the weakest -- lacks anyone of interest at all (unless you count God, to whom Gilbert prays in tears).

Her Swedish friend, who could have injected some dramatic heat, is woefully underdeveloped. Still, Hadi Subiyanto as the healer Ketut Liyer is a find, if only for his manic giggle.

Eat Pray Love is an essentially shallow movie, overly dependent on images of food and tourism porn, with cues for viewers to pull out the tissues at strategic points.

This wouldn't be so regrettable were it not pretending to offer profound, even spiritual enlightenment.

Yet for all its pretensions, I suspect the film will find a sizeable audience, and not only because of the book's popularity and Roberts's celebrity. The mid-life crisis film story is a male-dominated sub-genre -- think American Beauty, Last Tango in Paris and Lost in Translation (where Scarlett Johansson was really a foil for Bill Murray). It's hard to think of female-centric examples from Hollywood. Come to that, it's hard to think of any female stories from the studios at all that aren't bog standard rom-coms or woman-as-surrogate-male adventurers.