'Eat Pray' is a too-slick version of the book

It's easy to mock a book that's been lodged on the best-seller lists longer than most preschoolers' lives, that has sold in the kabillions, prompted imitators, parodies, and Oprah accolades, and, well, one that revels in the me-ness of it all. Such a book is Elizabeth Gilbert's Eat, Pray, Love.

But there's a reason so many people - the vast majority women - have responded to the peripatetic memoir: From the depths of depression, from a marriage that was broken and a life that felt dead, Gilbert rises up, tries pasta in Italy, meditation in India, and a man in Indonesia - and comes away wiser, and worldlier, for her efforts.

The writing is good - funny, poignant, precise - and even if her ephiphanies read like New Age bumper stickers, they are real ephiphanies. Gilbert worked through pain to experience them. On an emotional level, the book rings true.

Which is not exactly how Eat Pray Love, minus the commas and with Julia Roberts as the writer "Liz" Gilbert, rings. Shot in burnished magic-hour light (the crew must have toiled feverishly over a hundred dawns and dusks), with rapturous attention paid to dishes of prosciutto and melon, and to the dishy men in Liz's life (Billy Crudup as the husband she leaves, James Franco as the rebound beau, and finally, Javier Bardem, as the hopelessly sensitive, sensual soulmate), the film is a glorious travelogue, a charmer.

But it lacks the resonances of Gilbert's book. Sure, Liz is glum and desperate as she stumbles around New York, but a couple of close-ups of Roberts misting up and telling her aimless spouse that she wants out don't quite do the trick.

Maybe it's the Carrie Bradshaw voice-over narration, or that Julia Roberts movie-star glow, or the fact that director and cowriter Ryan Murphy opted to skirt the book's darker terrains. But this Liz feels less like an urgently searching woman and more like a series of brushstrokes and sound bites, a two-dimensional pilgrim. (Eat Pray Love, the 3-D conversion?)

And so, after some hand-holding with a best friend (Viola Davis), some divorce proceedings with a lawyer, and some sex with an actor (Franco) who appears in her Off-Off-Broadway play, Liz gets out. The idea is to spend a year abroad, trying to find balance, independence, and, possibly, God.

First stop is Rome, where Liz rents a photogenically distressed flat, falls in with a handsome crowd of natives and ex-pats, and discovers the glories of gelato, the pleasures in pizza, and the Italian concept of Il bel far niente: the beauty of doing nothing.

Like the book, only more so, it is the middle section - Liz's time in an ashram in India, scrubbing floors and trying to get the noise out of her head - that feels weakest. Richard Jenkins chews up the scenery here, playing an irrascible, truth-telling Texan on his own spiritual quest. And there's Tulsi (Rushita Singh), a bright teenager set for an arranged marriage - Liz's heart goes out to her.

And then, for the final four months of her hegira, it's the rice paddies and rain forests of Bali. This is where Eat Pray Love, in a brief prologue, began: Liz the travel writer meeting Ketut (Hadi Subiyanto), a Yoda-like medicine man who predicted that she would lose all her money, but that she would gain it back (and how!), live a long life, find true love, and return to Bali within the year to teach him English.

Presto. Liz finds a beautiful open-walled house looking onto lush, verdant gardens. Liz finds friends in a healer and her daughter. And Liz finds Felipe (Bardem), a Brazilian who exports Balinese bric-a-brac and who runs Liz down while she's riding her bike. He woos her. He wins her. And, this being the true love that Ketut had spoken of, she wins him, too.

Director Murphy, of TV's "edgy" Nip/Tuck and of the hit series Glee, turns out to be a pretty conventional filmmaker. Rome and Bali, beautiful? Certainly. But even the squalor of India gets prettified, and the characters Liz encounters along the way all say the right things, in the right way, even when they're wrong.

Perhaps, in the hands of a more adventurous, idiosyncratic director (think Jim Jarmusch's loping explorations), Eat Pray Love would have been something more than a slick and scenic synthesis of Gilbert's book. Lives are messy. A little mess in the movie wouldn't have hurt at all.EndText