Even the many talents of uber-charismatic Julia Roberts can’t redeem the fact that this is a film about a shallow, self-obsessed woman based on a book on the same topic. It’s a two-and-a-half hour exercise in self-indulgence, and while pretty to see, it’s painful to watch.

For starters, we see a beautiful woman with a successful career, elegant home and handsome husband in so much anguish over her sorry situation that she decides her only option is to leave it all behind and travel the world for a year—even though said handsome husband is begging her to stay, to give him another chance, to at least try and work things out. The woman next to me in the theater when I screened the film cried out, “I’ll take him!” That’s what happens when you cast Billy Cruddup as a schlub. Robert’s Liz doesn’t need an exotic getaway, she needs a good spanking and to be grounded from her charge cards. How are we supposed to have either sympathy or empathy for someone so shallow?

Her revelations, which are long in coming, are vacuous and murky. Her best realization dawns in Italy, when she finally understands it’s okay to enjoy food and go up a size or two. I’m not quite sure about the film’s attempt at hilarity when Liz and her new found Swedish friend lie down on the dressing room floor trying to wriggle into too small jeans. I thought the point of the shopping trip was to buy bigger jeans?

So Liz eats her way through Italy, then meditates (more than prays) her way through India. She is somehow supposed to get over her tragic self by contemplating her navel for hours and hours each day. Plenty of opportunities for service in India—you know, helping the poor, healing the sick, that type of thing? But Liz is more interested in introspection. Richard Jenkins, playing a wise old Texan, is a welcome diversion, because by now we’ve had quite enough of Liz whining about the unbearable heaviness of being.

On to Bali, where, to her credit, Liz does help a single mom buy a house, but she blows off the elderly shaman she’s committed to helping in favor of running off with the fabulous Felipe (Javier Bardem). Okay who wouldn’t? But couldn’t she have fooled around by night and done her work by day? Not our Liz—she’s so obsessed with finding herself and true love she loses an entire nation of people.

In the end it turns out, that ultimate happiness can only be achieved by successfully mating. So much for the finding yourself theme, the independence and the self-realization of it all. It’s just another cruising off into the sunset with your true love movie. By now you’ve probably figured out that I was one of the few people on the planet who didn’t like the book, either. Both should be re-titled Eat Pray Nap.

Rated PG-13

—Lisa Johnson Mandell