The story of a writer who wakes up one day to discover that she is not as happy with her life as she would have hoped. Much like the woman Julia Roberts plays in Larry Crowne, our hero finds that her layabout husband with his half-assed plans and never fulfilled dreams is not going to be a part of her future. She throws her hands in the air and leaves him.
She instantly hooks up with a whiny actor and moves in with him, seeing as she gave all her worldly possessions to her soon to be ex-husband. While living with the actor, she follows him to an Ashram where she appears to barely tolerate his obsessive chanting to a portrait of an Indian lady. Which makes it somewhat surprising that one of her quests becomes visiting this Guru in India.
She has no money, but this is never a problem in the movies. She just magically appears in Rome, where she rents an ancient apartment and spends all her time eating in nice Italian restaurants. She also meets a number of interesting people and they have deep philosophical discussions about the meaning of live and various Italian words. She learns that to speak Italian you must use your hands as often as possible. This goes on for a couple of months.
After putting on twenty pounds, she moves to India and spends a few months living at the Guru’s Ashram where she learns to scrub the floors and meditate for hours a day. She gets sage advice from an old Texan and smiles as one of her new friends is forced into an arranged marriage. She ends her time in India by meeting a rouge elephant in the garden.
The film opened with Julia sitting in the presence of a witch doctor in Bali. He told her that she would return and that he would share with her all that he knows. He also said this would happen after she lost all of her money. So naturally, she returns to her own personal Guru to learn the fine art of being a witch doctor and to fall in love.
It is never made clear exactly how our wandering writer pays for all of this travel, food, and lodging on her year long trek of self discovery. I don’t suppose it really matters. Except that the message seemed to be: Don’t like your life? Try hitting the road and see what happens!
I liked Eat Pray Love well enough, but it all seemed a little too fantastical for my taste. Maybe that just explains why I’m not living in Rio or Istanbul or Perth or. . .
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Eat Pray Love was really inspiring to me as well, but I agree with you- it’s rather unrealistic. Money is a very real factor outside of movies!
As far as inspirational midlife crisis books go, I’ve found that “Midlife Crash Course” by Gail Feldman