Now I can tell you about the actual inspiration for my new bi-monthly series, which was not The Bucket List, that being my example of the phenomenon I'm considering when I first announced Audient Zeitgeist.
The actual inspiration was Eat Pray Love, which I seem to have encountered a lot in culture, even 15 years after it came out -- in fact, especially lately.
I can't count the number of times -- okay, it's probably only two or three -- that I've seen a character in some movie or TV show talk about an upcoming trip of self-discovery and say "I'm going to Eat Pray Love that shit." In fact, it's a line of dialogue I can imagine someone like Jonah Hill saying, because that's the kind of thing a Hill character would say -- at least back at the time that Eat Pray Love actually came out, if not the current version of Hill.
The idea being that while on this trip the character is discussing, they're going to eat a lot, pray a lot (or at least a little), and, if all goes well, love.
Which means that like The Bucket List, Eat Pray Love has risen up in our culture beyond its potentially modest roots as an adaptation of self-help chic lit starring Julia Roberts, to become a thing everybody knows about and can easily understand the meaning of what you're talking about just from a reference to the title.
Of course, the really qualifying aspect of the movie for this series is that I had never seen it.
I corrected that on Tuesday night, perhaps choosing an inopportune night to do it since I'd played tennis that night and the movie is 2 hours and 20 minutes long. Of course, any opportunity may have been inopportune, because I didn't like it very much.
I don't think you need me to recap the plot, but I will anyway. Roberts plays a woman, Liz, who discovers sort of abruptly (at least as the film presents it) that she is not very happy in her marriage to a character played by Billy Crudup, and one day, after anachronistically praying to God (Liz is not religious), through tears she tells Crudup she doesn't want to be married anymore. She hasn't yet discovered what she does want, and has a fling with an actor played by James Franco. Because of the poor sense of pacing of Ryan Murphy's film, the passage of time in this fling is hard to chart, such that in no screen time at all, she also wants to escape Franco and it seems like they've had some sort of soulful relationship that she mourns in equal measure to her marriage.
The thing she does want, ultimately, is to travel around the world to three specific locations all starting with I -- could there be any better metaphor for her self-involvement -- which are Italy, India and Indonesia. (Though Indonesia is always referred to in the film as just "Bali," since perhaps that sounds more exotic than "Indonesia.") She couldn't know that this was how it would turn out, of course -- unless the script is lazy enough to posit that she does -- but these three legs of her journey will correspond to the three words in the film's title, in that order. The trip is planned to take a year.
First I want to talk about how shoddy this film looks, especially for a travelogue into which we are meant to dream ourselves away. And I don't think it was just the fact that Stan, my Australian streamer, makes everything look a bit shoddy, especially compared to watching the same movie on any of my other streamers. (I should have checked to see if it was on them. I just saw it was on Stan, because it's the kind of movie Stan would have, and stopped there.)
More specifically in its shoddy appearance, let's talk about the lighting. Which is way too dark, even in the majority outdoor scenes in these three locations, but especially where we start in New York. That may have been an intentional thematic choice by Murphy, but I don't feel inclined to give him the benefit of the doubt. But on that topic of lighting, there are entirely too many scenes where Roberts has light shining on the back of her head, which made me think Murphy intended that as a halo effect. Yawn.
It's hard to think of there being a halo around Liz' head because it's not very easy to like her. For being two and a third hours long, Murphy's script, which he co-wrote with Jennifer Salt and Elizabeth Gilbert, doesn't put in the time for us to understand where Liz' sense of ennui originated. Sure, a person can be unhappy just because they're unhappy, but Liz comes across as a privileged person who doesn't totally appreciate what she has. Even the presentation of Crudup's character is pretty mild as an inciting incident for her divorce, and I wonder if that was to flatter the character by not making her capable of marrying a true narcissist. Without having an obviously toxic male to run away from, though -- and the movie starts to portray him more cartoonishly after the fact as a sort of corrective measure -- we don't really get what's driving this sudden desire to leave. Ultimately the movie is going to posit the fact that she "doesn't love herself so how could she love anyone else," which may be a true phenomenon in the world but doesn't seem any less corny, especially in Murphy's hands.
The journey gets better as it goes -- at least Murphy gets the momentum going in the right direction -- but I found Liz' experiences in Italy particularly insufferable. This is the section of the movie that bears the brunt of the "Eat" portion of the title -- only once do we even see her eat something again after this -- but it's not very good food porn. And there's the sort of ridiculous notion that Liz and her companion need to buy new jeans because they've gained too much weight while indulging in pizza and pasta. Because these are both professional actresses, one an icon of her generation, of course they did not gain a single pound while shooting the movie, so the notion that they now both have a "muffin top" -- Liz' term for the small roll of flab at her waist -- is totally unsupported by what we see on screen.
Plus this section is replete with cultural stereotypes of Italians and in all other ways unconvincing. There's this one attempted "joke" where a small Italian girl gives them the finger from the fire escape of her apartment building, based on nothing that they've done, only a desire by the screenwriters to add personality into the moment. It falls as flat as any of their other attempts at "jokes." At least, I should note, her handsome language teacher does not become a love interest for her, but rather, for her friend.
The India portion is weighted down by Liz' interactions with an American named Richard (billed as "Richard from Texas" on IMDB), and he's played by an actual Richard, Richard Jenkins. He gloms onto her so mercilessly that it seems like a failure at both the performance level and the directing level. The failure at the writing level is that he takes to calling her "Groceries," because when she first gets to the ashram where she'll be staying, he sees her eating a particularly large plate of food. Guess the "Eat" portion of the film is taking its time to transition into the "Pray" portion. And poor Liz, I think this is the last time we see food touch her lips in this movie. You shouldn't call someone "Groceries" if they have as big of a "muffin top" as Liz has. (Wait, no, she doesn't have a muffin top at all.)
He's of course got a back story that will reveal itself over time, and in this ashram -- which is, in a bit of irony that is never resolved, missing its guru because she's in New York, effectively trading places with Liz -- Liz has to do menial labor tasks to earn her keep, in addition to her praying. She also has an underdeveloped relationship with an Indian girl who works there (I. Gusti Ayu Puspawati) and who is dreading her arranged marriage.
I did eventually thaw on this section of the film a little bit, but I was pretty eager to get on to the Bali portion because that's the only of the three places I've actually been. (I was in Italy in college but it was the very far north and for a ski trip, which is very dissimilar to what we see here.)
Here, with the same level of abruptness that characterizes many of the other interactions in this movie, she meets Felipe (Javier Bardem), a Brazilian who I guess retired here (Bardem was only 41 in 2010) after his wife died ten years ealier. This is a homecoming of sorts for Liz because in an opening I didn't totally understand either, she had been there earlier to interview a local who can read your palm and tell your fortune, which is, I suppose, reason enough for her to have taken this trip in the first place, when the man told her she would be in one short marriage and one long one, but she didn't know which she was currently in.
I say this relationship is abrupt because I have already forgotten how these characters actually meet, but like one scene later they are swimming in beautiful Bali bays and apparently already deliriously in love. I guess they didn't meet cute enough for me to remember that part.
I didn't hate this section of the film either, but the overall effect of the whole experience was pretty disappointing.
I don't know, I guess I thought this might be fun -- kind of in a similar way to another Bali-set movie starring Julia Roberts, Ticket to Paradise with George Clooney, was fun. At least I thought it would be lit better.
But actually, I don't think this movie really wants to be fun. It tries to be fun on a couple occasions, but I think that's more a concession to the fundamental components of filmmaking than it is an actual interest in being fun. I think we need to read more into Roberts' opening tearful speech to God -- which comes out of left field when the movie is barely five minutes old, her crying face seen in awkward profile -- if we want to understand what this movie really thinks its about.
Now the real question is: Is its enduring spot in our zeitgeist justified?
I guess that's a different question than "do I understand it."
Yes I understand it, especially since few of the cultural references to the movie would be considered respectful. They're far more likely to be taking the piss out of the movie than suggesting a journey like this is actually a clear-eyed means of achieving self-actualization.
For one, such a journey is only available to someone who is pretty wealthy, or has been working all their life to save up for it. Roberts was only 43 in 2010, so she isn't the latter. She'd have to be the former even though, if memory serves, her character is only a journalist. And that's not me insulting journalists. That's me having been a journalist and knowing that the pay isn't great.
Then there's the inexcusable self-absorption of it. We are meant to be our own biggest supporters and all that, but there's a fine line between looking out for yourself and the "me me me" mentality that is only slightly softened here by Roberts' charm.
Plus there's the definite tourist's attitude to the hip trend of trying to know yourself better through eastern religion. I don't think Liz even articulates why it is that she wants to go to this ashram, considering that she doesn't seem to be that into the idea of the spiritual when she tries to pray to God. It's almost like it's shorthand that she's just a shallow rich lady who is susceptible to the ideas presented by the 2010 version of influencers without having any sincere knowledge of why she's doing the things she's doing.
Eat Pray Love is a myopic conceit that purports to be a real formula a real person could use to try to achieve a happier life. The cynical thing about it -- the book before it, I'm sure, and then the movie -- is that the people who are ready to receive this sort of message are rarely the ones who are in a position to enact what it is suggesting. I'm sure there were more than a few midwestern moms with mortgages -- MMMs, we might call them -- who dropped everything and took a plane somewhere in the hopes they would eat Italian food while still looking as good as Julia Roberts, and were quite sure there was a soulful Brazilian widower out there just waiting to fall head over heels for them. Three weeks later, maybe they came back with significantly less money to pay that mortgage.
I'll be back in April to chew over another zeitgeist movie I haven't seen.
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