Salon.com > Eat, Pray, Love

Why we love Julia Roberts

Sun, 15 Aug 2010 18:01:00 +0000

Julia Roberts, whose latest film, "Eat, Pray, Love," opens today, is one of the few recent-vintage movie stars whose fame and box-office clout rivals those of the great stars of the past. For a good long stretch -- roughly 1988, when Roberts stole "Mystic Pizza" and "Steel Magnolias" out from under her more established costars -- she was figurative and literal money in the bank. Her name could finance and open any film, no matter how mediocre. Her megawatt grin and tragic frown could sell almost any story, no matter how ludicrous. She's not quite on that level anymore, thanks less to any professional choices (if anything, her taste has grown more adventurous over time) than the fact that audiences and studios allow female stars a shorter shelf life than men. She was never a Meryl Streep-level performer, and Roberts would probably be the first to admit that. But she had, and still has, that ineffable something that separates stars from actors -- plus aspects of humility and arrogance that surface from time to time, puncturing her carefully managed image in ways she almost certainly didn't expect.

The “Eat, Pray, Love” guru’s troubling past

Sat, 14 Aug 2010 18:01:00 +0000

When audiences go to "Eat, Pray, Love" this weekend, they will watch as Julia Roberts, blond and brokenhearted, folds her long, long legs into a perfect letter X, chants a mysterious mantra, and magically finds the equanimity that has been eluding her. Viewers will see her undergo life-changing experiences thanks to her guru's grace and the spirit of her guru's master, a man she calls a "South Indian old lion." They will perhaps be awed and enchanted by the exotic spiritual treasure chest that is India. And then they will cheer for her as she finally mends the cracks in her heart and makes her way to Bali to find love.

What they probably won't know is that the unnamed guru is a hugely controversial figure who has disappeared from public view amid allegations of manipulation, financial misconduct and intimidation. And as that guru's organization, the Siddha Yoga Dham of America (SYDA), has come under fire, her own guru (yes, gurus also have gurus), the "old lion," has been accused of sexual abuse, molestation and sexual intercourse with minor girls.

The new colonialism of “Eat, Pray, Love”

Sat, 14 Aug 2010 00:20:00 +0000

For the longest time I thought "Eat, Pray, Love" was a sequel to "Eats, Shoots and Leaves."

Now I am enlightened. One is about the search for the meaning of life. The other is about the meaning of a comma.

I confess I never read Elizabeth Gilbert's bestseller except for browsing through a few pages in a copy sitting on a friend's bedside. I enjoyed the writing. Gilbert is warm and sympathetic. The story of picking yourself up after losing your way has universal appeal even if we all can't recharge under the Tuscan sun.

It's not Gilbert's fault but I have an instinctive reflex reaction to books about white people discovering themselves in brown places. I want to gag, shoot and leave.

In a way I almost prefer the old colonials in their pith helmets trampling over the Empire's far-flung outposts. At least they were somewhat honest in their dealings. They wanted the gold, the cotton, and laborers for their sugar plantations. And they wanted to bring Western civilization, afternoon tea and anti-sodomy laws to godforsaken places riddled with malaria and beriberi.

“Eat, Pray, Love”: A phenomenon goes bust

Fri, 13 Aug 2010 00:20:00 +0000

The enormous success of Elizabeth Gilbert's travel memoir "Eat, Pray, Love" is one of those paradoxes that pretty much define modern life. There is nothing affluent Westerners of the information-economy class like better than being told that our lives lack soulfulness, sensuality and a sense of purpose -- except, perhaps, for heaping derision on those who bring us this news. Every move in this dance is so well rehearsed that none of it can escape cliché: not the original complaint about our shallowness and materialism, not the presumptive moral high ground and false modesty of the evangelist-observer, not the exaggerated, Bill O'Reilly-style scorn of those who feel their iPhoned and Twitterized lifestyle is under attack.

As almost everyone reading this will already know, "Eat, Pray, Love" is the autobiographical and presumably truthful story of a woman who "pulls a geographic" (as some 12-steppers say) on an epic scale, fleeing first her troubled marriage and then her relationship with a hot, younger boyfriend for a year-long voyage of self-discovery to Italy, India and Bali. Gilbert is a sharp and amusing prose stylist and an openhearted critic of her own foibles and failings. She's aware that her personal and literary odyssey contains potential contradictions: The tale of a well-connected New York writer traveling the globe on somebody else's dime and sampling an array of seemingly disconnected experiences might strike many people as a symptom of our cultural dislocation and commodity fetishism, not a cure.

My ironic “Eat, Pray, Love” romance

Fri, 06 Aug 2010 11:01:00 +0000

I see them in the check-in line at the airport: caftan-wearing women eager to live out "Eat, Pray, Love." As we wait to board the plane to Bali, their mouths are set in thin lines of determination between their wide-brim straw hats and cheerful scarves. Bali's city of Ubud, for those who have not read Elizabeth Gilbert's book (yes, those people still exist), is the temple-and-rice paddy-filled setting for the book's final portion, in which our heroine, having struggled to find peace and acceptance in Italy and India, falls in love with a Portuguese man named Felipe. And women of all ages have followed Gilbert here. I roll my eyes when I see them walking around Ubud in their floaty clothes, ferrying themselves to appointments with spiritual healers while keeping their third eyes wide open for a man to fulfill their latent desires.

We all know "Eat, Pray, Love" has hijacked book clubs worldwide, and will only become more popular with next week's release of the Julia Roberts movie, but less is known of the way it has affected international travel, creating a kind of bourgeois sexual tourism. I feel bad for these women, who seem to think that by following the same steps as one writer, they can somehow graft her happy ending onto their own frustrated lives. My disdain was such that early in my trip, I wrote a story about how they were ruining Bali (the story recently ran on Jezebel).

Eat pray equivocate

Fri, 21 Aug 2009 12:21:00 +0000

Fairy-tale weddings, searching for Prince Charming, or even for Mr. Big: It all seems so 1990s. These days, it's women, not men, who are reluctant to commit to marriage -- with those who have committed regretting having done so -- and they're writing about it all over the place. Earlier this summer, Sandra Tsing-Loh, in an essay about her divorce, came out against the "companionate marriage" in the Atlantic Monthly. Cristina Nehring blamed such bloodless arrangements for the bankrupt state of romance in "A Vindication of Love." Only the profoundly unhip Caitlin Flanagan defended the institution in Time. (The upshot of her un-sexy argument? It's for the kids.)