Eat Pray Love is the film version of travel writer Liz Gilbert’s memoir (over three years on the best seller list) of the same name.

Julia Roberts plays Gilbert who divorces her husband (Billy Crudup) and leaves her new lover (James Franco) in New York to travel for a year to find herself. She eats for four months in Rome, prays (or at least meditates) for four months in an Indian ashram and finds love in Bali in Indonesia to fill out her year.

This reviewer hasn’t read the book and the most common comment heard as I exited the theatre was that it wasn’t as good as the book, or that it didn’t do justice to the book. It should also be noted that 97% of the audience was women, most of whom had obviously read the book.

Now Roberts is a fine actress and the film is beautifully put together. The food in Italy looks fantastic and falling in love in Bali with a nice character played by charming Javier Bardem is hard to resist.

But as painless and often pleasant as this movie is, and as well as it pushes most of the right buttons, Robert’s character is very self-indulgent and seems to work too hard at being unhappy. Somehow it never finds the right emotional level, but there is lots of emotion up there on the screen. Maybe too much. It is also just too long.

Rating: three deer of five

Next Week on Video

The Back-up Plan has Jennifer Lopez finding the man of her life just after she’s artificially inseminated.

Alf Cryderman is a Red Deer freelance writer and old movie buff.