Week #7: Eat, Pray, Cough
a woman in search of her NyQuil
I’ve been coughing up a lung since Friday. In that time I’ve missed one day of work and two birthday parties, which I made up for entertainment-wise by watching two full seasons of new shows (Love is Blind Season 6 & Expats), two comedy specials (Taylor Tomlinson & Jack Whitehall), and four movies (Players, Eat, Pray, Love, Past Lives, and Killers of the Flower Moon). WILDLY varying degrees of quality. If I had to rank them quickly and without much critical thinking (this is an insane list to make, it’s beyond an “apples and oranges” comparison it’s like comparing an apple to a hyundai or something) I’d go:
Past Lives
Love is Blind
Killers of the Flower Moon
Eat, Pray, Love
Expats
Players
Taylor Tomlinson
Jack Whitehall
I don’t know how that holds up, I’m still pretty NyQuil-infused at the moment so none of my opinions can be held against me. It was also my NyQuil-infused self who found the spiel title “Eat, Pray, Cough” hilarious/genius. I doubt I’ll have the energy to review all eight of these viewing experiences, but maybe I’ll shape the rest of this spiel around our middle-of-the-pack, 2010 book-to-movie juggernaut and see how it turns out.
Have you seen that trend of making hyper-specific Letterboxd movie lists? Watching Eat, Pray, Love made me think I should start one for “Movies with a Character Named Delia” (In EPL, Viola Davis plays Liz Gilbert’s happily-married foil, Delia Shiraz). I suppose having a Letterboxd account would be the first step, maybe I’ll come around to it like I did goodreads, for now this spiel will be my Letterboxd. I’m positive that I’ve seen EPL before, but I have a goldfish-like memory when it comes to movies for some reason, and approach even rewatches with a blank slate. Basically all I remembered was Julia Roberts, Italy, India. I did not remember: James Franco as her out-of-work yogi actor boyfriend (who somehow has a giant, gorgeous, candle-lit NYC apartment with exposed brick), Julia Roberts shopping for, in her own words, “big lady pants” (size 4 MAX) after eating like one normal portion of spaghetti, how sooooo 2010 this movie is and how it must’ve killed with a very particular sect of women. I’ve never read the book, but there were so many moments where I was like “that’s gotta be the exact line.” It had a very Wild (2014) feel to it in that way, a natural predecessor to the solo female sojourner/quester story that probably feels less cheesy in book form.
I’m guessing most have seen Eat, Pray, Love and don’t need a full synopsis. Basically, she’s a woman in search of her word, okay? She tries out a few: Daughter. Wife. Girlfriend. Writer. Spoiler: the word she lands on is “attraversiamo” which means “let’s cross over” which is really three words, which is cheating, but whatever. She travels through Italy (eats) and India (prays), and ultimately sails away with Javier Bardem (loves). It’s a mostly okay watch with occasionally good dialogue and a few thinker moments about how it feels to be untethered from purpose and in the midst of transformation, and if you give yourself over to that or are a 2010 divorcee I’m sure this is an incredibly moving story.
For me–Daughter, Writer, Baby–the story itself didn’t do much, but two random details made me cry, so I thought I’d share those (good, sad cries). The first, is when Julia Roberts is flexing her newly-learned Italian by ordering for the table. She confidently lists off dishes, including linguine or spaghetti alle vongole, and upon hearing vongole I started crying. I had only heard that word before from Papa*, who loved clams and also liked flexing his Italian (he could speak three languages you know, he’d always remind you). The second detail that got me is during a wedding flashback wherein Julia Roberts’ husband Stephen does a surprise dance to “Celebration” by Kool & the Gang. Guess who started sobbing again? Me, the only person watching Eat, Pray, Love in the year 2024. See, my family had this gray boombox growing up, and it was a birthday morning tradition to burst into the celebrant’s room, waking them up to “Celebration”, everyone piling in and singing. Mama, Papa, Daniel, Siobhan, Liam, I can picture them all coming into my room as I rubbed my tired eyes. I don’t even remember seeing the CD. It was like the boombox was just preprogrammed with only that song.
Anyway, Eat, Pray, Love gave me those two moments. I have moments like that all the time now. I’m grateful for them. Time for me to succumb to the NyQuil and get to sleep. I’ll spiel to ya later. This one felt good.
*I put an asterisk next to “Papa” because it’s an active choice to just say Papa. I find myself annoyed by the times I’ve had to use “my dad” in conversation about him because “dad” was just never the name I used for him and it feels weird referring to him that way when he was always Papa. That’s how I refer to him in all my writing writing, so I’ll do the same here.