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Review #536 of 365
Movie Review of Feast of Love (2007) [R] 102 minutes
WIP™ Scale: $11.50
Where Viewed: United Artists Denver Pavilions Stadium 15, Denver, CO
When 1st Seen: 28 September 2007
Time: 5:50 pm
DVD Release Date: 5 February 2008 (click date to purchase or pre-order)
Film's Official Website • Film's Trailer
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Directed by: Robert Benton (The Human Stain)
Screenplay by: Allison Burnett (Resurrecting the Champ) based on the book by Charles Baxter
Featured Cast (Where You Might Remember Him/Her From):
Morgan Freeman (Evan AlmightyEvan Almighty) • Greg Kinnear (Invincible) • Radha Mitchell (Silent Hill) • Billy Burke (Fracture) • Selma Blair (The Big Empty) • Alexa Davalos ("Reunion") • Toby Hemingway (The Covenant) • Stana Katic ("Heroes") • Erika Marozsán (Ghetto) • Jane Alexander (Fur: An Imaginary Portrait of Diane Arbus) • Fred Ward (Sweet Home Alabama) • Margo Martindale (Paris, je t'aime) • Missi Pyle (Alex Rider: Stormbreaker)
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Speaking only of the film version of Feast Of Love, directed by Robert Benton from the screenplay by Allison Burnett, conjures notions and contemplation as to what love really is. Bradley Thomas (Greg Kinnear), the story's main character, asks something to the effect of is love a cruel trick played on humans to get us to reproduce or is everything there is the only reason for this crazy dream we're in? Better answer the second one if you are to be his soul mate. The plot, which is less a contiguous story and more an ethereal glimpse into the lives of couples in a college town in Oregon, concerns the falling in and out of love that people naturally experience over the course of a relationship no matter how long or seemingly strong. Bradley loses his female partner of 6 years to another woman with whom she has an almost electric and immediate connection one afternoon after a softball game.
"…the story and the characters are not terribly convincing … a bit bland."
Bradley's best friend is Professor Harry Stevenson (Morgan Freeman)--a gentle soul and man who's lost his only son to a heroine overdose and still has not even begun to reconcile the loss. As the narrator of the story as well, Harry provides some insights into the characters and human nature. His own life partner, Esther (Jane Alexander), prods him to return to his position at the university, probably hoping that it will take his mind off his grief. She's a dear, dear woman, who tries to allow him the space and time he needs, but she seems confounded by his lack of comprehension that she's going through this too. Adjacent to their lives are two other couples: Oscar (Toby Hemingway), who works in Bradley's coffee shop, and Chloe (Alexa Davalos), who wanders into the coffee shop to find love at first sight in Oscar,
and Diana (Radha Mitchell), a realtor who wanders into the coffee shop at just the right time for Bradley to think she's heaven sent after his break up, and David Watson (Billy Burke) who's been having a two-year, extra-marital affair with Diana ever since she sold him his new house. These couples represent the young love and the secret love—or, in the case of Diana and David, is it love at all? He won't leave his wife, and Diana really wants to settle down despite the side of her that really likes the danger of their relationship. If it sounds a bit like a soap opera, that's because it is, albeit a more deeply written one, but then the writer isn't having to produce 40 minutes of teleplay, five days a week, year round either. Most of the dramatic tension in the film is stirred up by Bradley's inability to see that he keeps falling in love with the image of whom he thinks the woman will be, not whom she really is, and by Oscar's father, Bat (Fred Ward) whose continual drunken stupor and occasional death threats against Chloe fuel much concern. The story has a very tragic climax that, while foreshadowed (actually it's not even foreshadowed it's foregone), is bound to leave the hopeless romantics in the audience clamoring for their money back. Even though the other storylines are tidied up and ended well, a still larger portion of the audience may also wonder, "what was the point?" Maybe it was, "Love will all your heart for as long as you can because you never know how long your love will last." Maybe there wasn't a point, because maybe there is no real point to love. Maybe it is that trick to encourage human reproduction, and the film was a trick to extract $9.50 out of our pockets under the guise of teaching us or showing us something we did not know about love.
In any case, the film's plot/story, unfortunately, does not deliver much other than an impact that seems wholly contrived. It makes the unfortunate mistake that we might actually have been made to care about any of these characters for some reason. Most of them we know only fleetingly because they happened to pop into Bradley's life. And while we might feel empathy for his situation, we don't really know enough about him except that his ex-wife says that he never really 'saw' her, to understand what type of a guy he is prior to making a conclusion as whether to care or not about him. Maybe he's not that great. Maybe he's not that interesting. He seems to think he's terribly loveable, yet he seems to be the only one who thinks so. So, because of this, the film wallows a bit too much in self-pity. It wanders somewhat aimlessly, and has to use a fortuneteller named Mrs. Maggarolian (Margo Martindale) who reads the tragedy of it all in Tarot cards, to produce what little real dramatic tension and concern for these characters we might muster.
While the story and the characters are not terribly convincing, the acting was quite the opposite. It takes all the more skill and talent, it would seem, to play fairly uninteresting characters with modestly troubling back-stories. At this, it was the young lovebirds in Toby Hemingway's Oscar and Alexa Davalos's Chloe that stood out the most. Their chemistry is electric and their love so obvious and deep. There's a wonderful scene wherein Oscar describes his dream future revealing the deeply unfulfilling childhood he's experienced and the joy he wants to bring to his future family. In many ways, the film would have been more powerful and interesting had all the other characters been de-emphasized and the focus switched from Bradley and Harry dealing with Bradley's neuroses to the power of the love of Oscar and Chloe. It's odd, because, it is their future that makes for the main focus of the climax of the film, not Bradley's woes as the first two-thirds of the film would lead one to believe. In the end, the film turned out a bit bland.
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Cast Members
Morgan Freeman • Greg Kinnear • Radha Mitchell
Billy Burke • Selma Blair • Alexa Davalos
Toby Hemingway • Stana Katic • Erika Marozsán
Jane Alexander • Margo Martindale
Director
Robert Benton
Writer
Allison Burnett
Review-lite
Feast of Love (2007) [max of 150 words]
Feast of Love, directed by Robert Benton, features various couples falling in and out of love in a small town in Oregon. Coffee shop owner, Bradley (Greg Kinnear) serves as the focus of the story as other characters move in and out of his life as narrated by best friend, Harry (Morgan Freeman) who adds insight as the story plods along. Sadly, along the way, the director and screenwriter made a catastrophic miscalculation in figuring they'd done enough to make any of the characters, with the possible exception of the young lovebirds, Oscar (Toby Hemingway) and Chloe (Alexa Davalos), interesting enough for anyone to care what happens to them. With the focus so heavily on Bradley, who seriously has to be one of the most uninteresting protagonists in the modern age of film, well, the film pretty much wallows in self-pity most of the time.
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