When I first heard about Eat Pray Love I was intrigued by the premise, and envious of the trip itself. Who has the time, or money, to simply check out of their life for a year and travel around the world? Well, it turns out, rich folks who can afford the luxury of embarking on a trip solely devoted to self-discovery, people who can do little but entertain themselves and think about their lives in an attempt to secure the nebulously named, but much sought after, balance.

Writer Elizabeth Gilbert (Julia Roberts) finds herself discontented with her life after an Indonesian medicine man gives her a prophecy about her future, including the information that she will someday return and study with him. She leaves her husband, Stephen (Billy Crudup), and jumps full force into a new relationship with David (James Franco). After some soul-searching and floundering around, it begins to dawn on Gilbert that she has no idea who she really is, and that some drastic measures must be taken. So begins a yearlong trip that takes her to Italy, where she wanders around seeing the sights, eats (and eats, and eats), makes new friends, and begins the recovery process. We then move to the "Pray" portion of the trip: an ashram in India, where she spends time trying to meditate, seeking God, and confronting her past with the help of a Texas hippie (Richard Jenkins). Finally Elizabeth ends up in Bali, spending time with the medicine man she met a year ago, seeking a balanced life as she begins to fall in love with a new man, Felipe (Javier Bardem). Eat Pray Love is based on a bestselling memoir by Elizabeth Gilbert, and it touches on a world of genres from travel film to self-help to romantic comedy.

We aren't exactly privy to the origin of Gilbert's crisis; we know that she is unhappy in her perfect house with her seemingly perfect husband and perfect job, but she begins to second-guess her choices. To be honest, her trembling sadness comes across as an abundance of navel-gazing. Gilbert is a 30-something, white, affluent woman, and the film reads like a collection of white-people problems. The film portrays Gilbert's decision to take off for an entire year to "find herself" as a holistic decision born of her desperate need for independence and rediscovery. But in real life Gilbert is a writer, and very cannily sold the entire project as a book, using money from her book advance to fund the trip itself. Betcha didn't know that, didja? This aspect of the project immediately made me wary, as it is never mentioned in the film. Is it even possible to have an authentic experience when the entire venture is constructed to have an interesting outcome?

However, Julia Roberts is at her finest, radiant and becoming, softer and less brash than she has been in years, a perfect counterpoint to the suave magnetism of Javier Bardem. The film itself is constantly bathed in shimmering light, as if heaven itself had shed a glow upon its most favored daughter. The dining sequences border on gastro-porn as incredible food is ordered and consumed; each meal looks tastier than the last. It reminded me of a foreign film for people who don't like foreign films. All the comforts of home are here, English-speaking beautiful people with exotic locales, friendly conversations, and happy endings.

Eat Pray Love is intensely self-centered as only a dramatic journey of self-discovery could be. The characters are stereotypical and flat with no more depth than a puddle, each person allotted minimal time in which to touch Gilbert's life and then get the hell out. With so much crammed in, it feels much longer than the roughly two hours and fifteen minutes of running time. There is very little darkness in Eat Pray Love, and there are almost no real problems. Everyone Gilbert meets is charming, affable, kind, and helpful. There's no real lingering sadness from any other corner, partially because there simply isn't room for it within Gilbert's onslaught of self-involvement.

The platitudes and lessons peddled by the film are mostly vague: learn to forgive yourself, don't obsess over trivialities, let yourself love again. Even Gilbert's journey to an Indian ashram to visit a guru is hopelessly non-specific, the religious aspects of the film kept non-offensive in their simplification. The lessons Gilbert (and by proxy, the audience) learns are formless, though that may be the point of the film. Even though you've heard truths about yourself and the world around you a million times, until you experience life and learn them for yourself, they remain nothing more than things someone else said.

Bottom line: If you like looking at pretty places, perhaps places you yourself have dreamed of going, you will like Eat Pray Love. There are aspects of the story that are very relatable: the self-absorption and grief will be familiar to anyone who has been through the end of a relationship and the modern feeling of drift that should compel us to change our lives and live well. Most people don't have the means to escape in such a grand fashion, and the film is the height of escapist fantasy. Ideally, Eat Pray Love would inspire women to be more thoughtful about intentionally living their own lives, but too much of the film boils down to a popular narcissism. "You, you, you!" Ketut, the medicine man, says to Liz when she visits him again, and she repeats back, ever so un-ironically, "Me, me, me!"

Grade: B-