Eat pray love

A Brad Pitt company co-produced Eat Pray Love, the adaptation of a chick-lit memoir that Julia Roberts identified as an ideal vehicle to drive. The book was written by Elizabeth Gilbert, an American freelance writer who obtained a publisher's advance large enough to finance a year's travel and research for Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman's Search for Everything Across Italy, India and Indonesia. That's the sort of market-savvy title that gets optioned by publishers, pushed on the Oprah show (twice) and turned into a chick flick.

Gilbert self-portrayed herself as a miserable travel-feature-writing wife who has an affair, gets divorced, and sets off to find her true inner self through flings with great foreign food (Italy = Eat), eastern spirituality (India = Pray) and swarthy men (Indonesia, specifically Bali, where she doesn't meet an Indonesian, but a more market-acceptable rich Brazilian = Love).

It is assumed that Gilbert knew exactly what her three chosen foreign lands represented: dream destinations for frustrated female readers of chick-lit. Conveniently for simple readers' memories, each chosen country begins with a capital I, and the resultant egocentric puff-pastry literary confection slid into the best-seller lists for more than three years, which it might not have done if she'd ventured on a diet-conscious cook's tour of Iceland, Iraq and Iran.

Commercial considerations have been a writing industry staple since long before Dickens mastered the craft. Gilbert's goulash of popular ingredients is akin to many other escapist fantasies, and its success ensured the attention of Julia Roberts. One might have expected Jennifer Aniston to be a prime casting option, but one thing (Mrs Brad Pitt) or another (box-office credibility) may have scotched that idea.

Julia Roberts is good at driving vehicles; although her acting machine has only a few gears (stare, frown and wistful smile) she uses them well to coast around any dramatic corners she meets in a screenplay. There are no corners in the shallow screenplay designed by writer-director Ryan Murphy, previously best known for his creation of TV's Nip/Tuck and Glee. Jennifer Salt, an older Hollywood hand, worked on Nip/Tuck and assisted Murphy in writing this feature film debut.

A small squadron of good actors waste their talents in support of Roberts: Billy Crudup (the husband who doesn't meet her needs), James Franco (the lover who doesn't ditto), Richard Jenkins (the father-figure pal in her Indian ashram) and Javier Bardem (the Brazilian romancer she beds in Bali). Actresses also appear here and there, and it's demographically convenient that Roberts' character has a black best friend (Viola Davis). When no one else needs to be on set, Roberts strides meaningfully or mournfully through pretty locations, whining to the audience. She is saved from being the most cringe-making person around by an ever-smirking dentally-challenged 9th-generation pseudo-Balinese fortune-teller whose tourist-English pop-philosophy would curdle coconuts and make Jackie Chan look and sound like Lord Olivier.

Elizabeth Gilbert is either a very shrewd writer or a tedious narcissist. Or, to be fair, both. In real life, she found a new life-partner and created another best-seller, Committed: A Skeptic Makes Peace with Marriage. A cynic will assume the book's title came first.