These days, you can’t think of the name Ryan Murphy without associating the writer, director and producer to gruesome stories like Monsters: The Lyle and Erik Menendez Story and The Watcher. Murphy found a gold mine in productions based on true-crime stories, but a little over a decade ago he dedicated his time to far more wholesome projects. In 2010, on the heels of his hit series Glee, Murphy helmed a movie that had a pretty good turnaround: Eat Pray Love, with Julia Roberts (Leave the World Behind) in the lead.
As the title suggests, Eat Pray Love centers around three moments in the life of Elizabeth Gilbert (Roberts), who decides to embark on a transformative journey when her life is turned upside down. To learn and enjoy cuisine, she goes to Italy. To have contact with spirituality from other cultures, she goes to India and then Bali — where she ends up meeting a Brazilian heartthrob named Felipe (Javier Bardem). The cast also features Viola Davis (The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes), Richard Jenkins (Nightmare Alley), Billy Crudup (The Morning Show), Mike O’Malley (Snowpiercer), Christine Hakim (The Last Of Us) and James Franco (The Deuce).
Eat Pray Love was a bit of a surprise hit. Made on a $60 million budget, it ended up grossing over $200 million worldwide, which is a pretty good performance for a romcom. Some elements that helped its popularity were pretty clear: Roberts is a massive draw to movie theaters, and the movie is based on a best-selling memoir written by Elizabeth Gilbert herself. So fans of the book were eager to see what Murphy and his screenwriting partner Jennifer Salt (American Horror Story) did with the material.
Why Didn’t ‘Eat Pray Love’ Have The Best Reception?
Despite its success, Eat Pray Love didn’t have the best reception among critics. It has a 35% score on Rotten Tomatoes, and critics like Independent‘s Anthony Quinn pointed out that the movie’s Liz “never veers from her own impermeable self-obsession.” Peter Bradshaw from The Guardian pointed out that the movie is problematic because it “patronises Italians, Indians, Indonesians.” Chicago Reader‘s Andrea Gronvall just flat-out called it “painfully preachy.”
Ever since the movie was released in 2010, conversations around privilege have greatly evolved and it’s not hard to see why many critics had a problem with a story that makes the woes of a white woman the center of the universe. However, we can’t deny that Eat Pray Love ends up becoming a kind of character study and that tells a lot about how we progressed over the course of the last 15 years. And it’s never bad to see Julia Roberts onscreen.
Eat Pray Love becomes available to stream on Max on January 1.
