'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.