Eat Pray Love - Review
Director: Ryan Murphy

Synopsis
A married woman realizes how unhappy her marriage really is, and that her life needs to go in a different direction. After a painful divorce, she takes off on a round-the-world journey to "find herself".

I didn’t really hear much about this film before I went to watch it. I had seen a couple of billboards in the streets and thought I’d give it a watch. The film it self is a 2 hour 15 min of seeing Julia Roberts going through every conceivable emotion imaginable, trust me that’s a lot!
I had not read the book which it (and most film now) was based on, so found it hard to watch the character of James Franco, which I personally found cringe worthy. Billy Crudup and Javier Bardem, were decent and nothing more then eye candy for the women.
Ryan Murphy’s direction through out the film is very student like, you can tell he was experimenting a lot with different angles and some unconventional shots, to his credit some of it did work.
A plus of the film was the cinematography; there are some beautiful visual images of Italy, India and Bali, as well as America itself.
As well as that the character of Richard Jenkins was powerful and moving and was interesting to see him in a unique role which did steal the scene between him and Julia Roberts.

Overall I would say that this was a distinctive trial by the director, in which he will learn a lot of what not to do next time. The mismatch of actors and story crammed into 2 and bit hours, clearly indicates that turning books into films is still a long way away from becoming a successful transition.

6/10 – being generous
Muni