August 17, 2010 01:00PM EDT
Best in Show: Billy Crudup
Eat Pray Love wouldn’t work without Julia Roberts front and center, but Billy Crudup as the ex-husband left behind wows from the sidelines.
It’s commonly known trivia that the statue of David, Michelangelo's 17-foot marble statue of human perfection, is actually a disproportionate fellow: his head and hands are too large for his body. He was sculpted this way to presumably read well from a distance; he’s meant to be gazed up at in Italy. So, too, with Julia Roberts on the movie screens, who is now having her own Italian adventure in Eat Pray Love. Her facial features are too much: those brown orbs are massive and expressive, and her mouth, which is prone to huge smiles and peals of laughter, is at least two sizes too big. Those expressive features feel like they were genetically engineered just to make her one of the screen’s great stars. After a long absence from lead roles—even in last year’s Duplicity, she shared the spotlight—she’s back to center stage in Eat Pray Love.
Roberts plays the New York writer Elizabeth Gilbert, who tackles a year of world traveling to find herself after a ruined marriage with Stephen (Crudup) and a failed rebound affair with a young actor (James Franco). In Rome Liz eats, in India she prays, and in Bali she learns to love. Roberts has occasionally been criticized for being disconnected from her fellow actors in performance, a somewhat common weakness in supersized stars who know they can fill the screen on their own. But this arguable remove of hers is actually an asset in a story about a woman who can’t quite connect or doesn’t trust herself to do so.
Many fine actors share the screen with Roberts in the film’s four acts and locales. It’s not inconceivable that Richard Jenkins (The Visitor), her eventual companion in India, might win Oscar attention. At first he seems to be doing a caricature of a pushy Southwestern crank. But when we arrive at his big monologue—Oscar clip!—it’s clear that that abrasive chatty exterior is only the armor he wears to keep all the hurt inside. It’s moving work, but the lynchpin unsung player of Eat Pray Love is Billy Crudup.
Crudup, who is not in much of the picture, plays the abandoned husband. In Crudup’s quick but detailed sketch, we get an early sense of Stephen as a man who is somewhat adrift and aimless. He leans on his wife for comfort and stability, but he’s never quite willing to see her discomfort. What’s more, he doesn’t understand it; this marriage is enough for him. When she ends the marriage, the actor isn’t unafraid to drop all actorly vanity. He’s been badly bruised, and in the divorce hearing early in the picture, where he chooses to represent himself, he lashes out not so much viciously as pathetically. He’s like a little boy who has had his favorite toy ripped from him. But Crudup deepens the portrait as the scene plays on. He’s a grown man. It’s just that his heart is in pieces.
In most films about failed marriages, the protagonist has always been wronged. Eat Pray Love is a mature enough movie to realize that you don’t have to demonize the dumpee to get the audience on Liz’s side. That’s what they hired Julia Roberts for. In fact, the movie is better for making you understand the hurt she’s caused him. Why else all those scenes in India about self-forgiveness? Billy Crudup gets one more big scene halfway through the picture that further endears him to the audience. Liz flashes back to her wedding and there he is again, freshly in love and completely charming. Yes, he’s still maybe a bit immature, but he does have her happiness in mind. He’s working hard to wring that famous movie laugh from Julia Roberts. Like movie audiences the world round, he loves to see her smile.
Click the poster to find movie times near you for Eat Pray Love:
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