How could you resist “Eat Pray Love”? It’s all the clinking wine glasses and bland spaghetti with marinara of an Olive Garden ad mixed with the exotic, yet soothing packaging of a slender can of Moroccan Bazaar Febreze gag-mist, finished off with — yes, I am going to tell you the last scene here — a Brazilian with his shirt rakishly unbuttoned motor-boating the heroine literally into the sunset.

How? About the same way you mute ads, especially the well crafted ones that tug on your sense that pleasure in Italy, spirituality in India and wave-crashing romance in Bali are better versions of the tawdry copies of copies of copies that pass for it here in America — You Can Have It All, and in a typically American payment of one year’s earnings and an investment of time in each 1/6th as demanding as your average cell phone contract.

This argument does not fly with a lot of people. Oprah loved it. The millions of people who bought Elizabeth Gilbert’s memoir about a top-echelon writer of fluff instigating, and then “coping” with a divorce (in other words, the kind of problem you make, not the kind of problem you have) really seemed to reach people, at least in that part of the American soul touched by daily affirmation calendars with things on them like Gilbert’s odiously named “The Physics of the Quest,” which she describes brain-curdlingly as follows: “a force of nature governed by laws as real as the laws of gravity or momentum.” And the rule of Quest Physics maybe goes like this: ‘If you are brave enough to leave behind everything familiar and comforting (which can be anything from your house to your bitter old resentments) and set out on a truth-seeking journey (either externally or internally), and if you are truly willing to regard everything that happens to you on that journey as a clue, and if you accept everyone you meet along the way as a teacher, and if you are prepared — most of all — to face (and forgive) some very difficult realities about yourself … then truth will not be withheld from you.’

A 34-year-old with henna tattoos packing up for a year-long journey in Club Med for a fantasy as grueling as a beach-read on Valium? If you need some “truth” about that, here it is: look around you, grow up, grow a sense of shame and learn how to deal.

The soft-focus journey of “Eat Pray Love” is a feel-good trifecta that chalks up the virtue points like a pinball machine: heartbroken, beautiful professional with perfect wardrobe? Bing! A whole year proving to all your nose-to-the-grindstone schlub friends that, while surely many of them have experienced divorce — and maybe worse things, like death, miscarriage, adultery, financial ruin, sickness — you deserve better, and that you’re a better person than they are. Bing! A Sally Struthers-ian “with just the amount of money you spend on coffee every day” email dashed out after a chance encounter with a struggling mother in Bali sparking a windfall of $18,000 from her friends (because truly, she implores, it is a better investment than the lavish parties I throw myself every year) and the eternal gratitude of the poor villager family? Eco-tourism jackpot!

A year’s worth of self-involvement guaranteed to make your acquaintances feel jealous they’re not as good as you for plunging adventurously into top-notch hotels where the friends flock to you like iron filings to a magnet, the meditation rooms are air-conditioned, and the beggars long only to stroke your soft hands out the window of a taxi. It’s the Epcot World Showcase for slim, cow-eyed, blindly seeking women with too much time to invent problems and not a second in which to think, “Wait, by all objective standards, I’m doing better than almost everyone in America. That means I’m doing better than almost everyone in the entire world. I can maintain

standards of health and safety and cleanliness, not to mention speed of travel and access to things, information, people and entertainment that even empresses couldn’t imagine for the bulk of history. To nurse my own broken heart, I’m — conservatively — spending in a year more than half of my countrymen will earn doing often thankless toil, day-in, day-out, in an effort just to pay the bills and keep their families fed.”

By all accounts, the real Gilbert is a lovely woman and a talented writer. I have no doubt her prose as vividly captures the best intentions and most beautiful moments of her protagonist and her journeys. But in the hands of “Glee” creator Ryan Murphy and the too-polished Julia Roberts, “Eat Pray Love” is the story of one woman’s lovely, grasping-for-tensions, all-expenses-paid experience with the kind of travel profiles the New York Times writes where, when you add up the most modest expenses for 48 hours in Bar Harbor Maine, you graze five figures. This is not a tale for these times.

It’s worth noting that Murphy created the plastic surgery tragi-comedy “Nip/Tuck” as well, which doesn’t deserve the same derision for an important reason, something that drastically sets it apart from “Glee” and “Eat Pray Love.” A tragi-comedy about plastic surgeons in Miami can’t have delusions of transcendence. Because it wasn’t trying to be capital-G-Mother-Teresa-wounded-woman-good, because it acknowledged and sometimes reveled in, sometimes struggled with its own shallowness, it was able to do what Gilbert was trying to do all along: transcend those expectations, and frequently inspire true surprise.

Ashley O’Dell writes about movies that aren’t in theaters anymore.