The purpose of a chick flick is to become inspired (or at least entertained) by the lives of women we can all relate to. Elizabeth Gilbert (Julia Roberts) is the everywoman’s worst enemy.
If she isn’t laughing it up at high-end dinner parties with her fellow ritzy wine-sipping friends, she is being hit on by charming, laid-back actors (played by James Franco, of course) or wandering through her brand-new luxury home at night, wondering why she isn’t happy. That’s a good question.
She makes up her mind to divorce a husband that practically leaped out of every American woman’s fantasy land and spend a year living a life of pleasure, adventure, and self- discovery. First stop: Italy where she finds herself in a crumbling but dreamily romantic Italian apartment and learning to speak the language from none other than the cover-boy for every paperback romance ever printed. She maintains a steady diet of pizza, pasta, and gelato and makes it quite clear that she could care less about her rapidly expanding waistline. But she is still not happy with her life.
So she goes to India and then to Bali and along the way discovers her inner balance through deep meditation, long rides on her bicycle and just a dash of steamy romance with another soul-seeking divorcee. She learns to forgive herself while sitting on the rooftop of an Indian temple, the sun warming her flawless skin and making her stunning brown eyes glow. And she ultimately finds perfect happiness, love, and, of course, balance while speeding through dazzling blue waters on a wooden boat, in the arms of Javier Bardem, as the sound of billowing, spirit-raising music engulfs her like chocolate around a truffle.
This is not the kind of movie that lets its self linger for too long on the unappetizing bits of life, though that is what is truly at the heart of Elizabeth’s journey. Her lowest moments are romantically steeped in close-ups of her eyes leaking out perfect tears without so much as flawing her mascara. Of course there is the “I don’t need to love you in order to love me!” explosion/revelation with her boyfriend near the end, at which point she leaves him gazing wistfully out to sea, probably crying because that’s the kind of guy he is.
Julia Roberts is perhaps the only person who could play this role. She is the kind of woman who audiences always want to see come out on top. She has a smile that lights up the screen, and an exuberance that lends its self wonderfully to the breezy spontaneity of her character. It is the only thing that lets us feel happy for her while simultaneously succumbing to venom-spitting envy.
Elizabeth Gilbert lived every woman’s fantasy. One day she realized that she wasn’t content with her life, and decided to pack her bags and go on a whirlwind world tour. But because of its lurid optimism, the movie never captures her discontentment to begin with. And so we have a character doing something that we all wish we could do because she is mildly irritated with her “conventionality”…whatever that is. Even though the odds of her winding up in the Italian gutter, an empty bottle of 1997 Biondi Santi in one hand and an empty wallet in the other were not in her favor, we only breeze over any consideration of practicality and go skipping along to the next spaghetti montage.
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