August 19, 2010 -- “Eat Pray Love” is a fairly typical travelogue movie about a journey of self-discovery, except for one thing, the traveler is a divorced woman seeking to heal her soul. This sort of spiritual journey almost always has a male main character, as in “Into the Wild” or “Seven Years in Tibet,” etc. There are not enough movies about people's spiritual side, so this is a welcome addition to this sparse genre.

Julia Roberts stars as Liz Gilbert, a woman going through a painful divorce, who seems to have lost her appetite for life, as well as her appetite for food. She gets her appetite for food back in Rome, although Paris would probably have worked as well. Gilbert picks up a nice circle of friends during her stay in Rome, but then she had friends in New York as well. She needs more than just a support group. She finds that something more in her next stop in India, where she finds the ashram of her boyfriend, David Piccolo's (James Franco of “Pineapple Express”) guru and tries transcendental meditation, but doesn't take to it right away. Here she finds yet another friend, Richard (Richard Jenkins of “Burn After Reading”) who convinces her she has to forgive herself before she can love again. Richard is also recovering from a painful divorce.

After India, she heads to Bali, where she seeks the wisdom of another spiritual leader, the Yoda-like Ketut Liyer (Hadi Subiyanto) she had met on a previous trip. Here she also meets Felipe (Javier Bardem of “No Country for Old Men”). Both she and Felipe are divorced, but they fall in love. But Liz doesn't want to lose herself in love, afraid she might get hurt again.

As you can probably tell, people who are divorced should relate to this film. It is all about the pain of divorce. There is terrific acting by Jenkins whose character talks about the pain of losing his family due to his alcoholism. There is some good acting in the rest of the film, but nothing else compares to Jenkins' great performance in this particular scene. He is easily the strongest male character in the film, which is otherwise dominated by women. This isn't “Steel Magnolias,” however. Not all men are depicted as idiots, or scum, just a bit weak. They are a bit too touchy-feely and wimpy. As Bill Murray said in “Groundhog Day” after Andie MacDowell tells him what she looks for in a man, “We are talking about a man here, right?” One gets the idea that both the men and the women in this film are depicted not as men and women really are, but the way women would like them to be.

Even though there is a lot of emotional pain in this film, there is also a lot of joy. It does focus on spirituality, a vital part of most human beings which nevertheless is absent in most films. The film doesn't get very deep into spirituality, it is more like pop psychology, but at least it tries to address it. This film rates a B.

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