Feast of Love wastes no time inviting the audience to dig in. Two women fall hard for each other in the film’s very first scene, which observes the conclusion of a softball game and then quickly repairs to a nearby bar frequented by the players. Kathryn (Selma Blair) and Jenny (Stana Katic) aren’t on the same team and had never met until one tagged out the other on the field, but that initial touch—“you’re it”—was apparently all they needed. At the bar afterward, Jenny plops down beside Kathryn with barely an introduction, and almost instantly the two are in full-on flirtation mode: prolonged eye contact, pregnant pauses, glancing brushes of hand against thigh clumsily disguised as gestures—the works. All the while, Kathryn is sitting no more than an inch away from her husband, Bradley (Greg Kinnear), who couldn’t be more oblivious. Love isn’t so much blind here as it is dense.
Will Feast of Love be the tale of a lesbian affair and a fatuous cuckold? Not exactly. Actually, not at all. Kathryn and Jenny vanish from the movie shortly thereafter, leaving Bradley to take up with Diana (Radha Mitchell), a pragmatic real-estate agent who can’t seem to extricate herself from her strictly sexual, bad-news relationship with a married man (Billy Burke). By day, Bradley runs a coffee shop regularly frequented by university professor Harry Stevenson (Morgan Freeman), whose decades-long marriage to Esther (Jane Alexander) is under considerable strain following the recent death of their only child. Which perhaps explains why Harry takes such a paternal interest in the shop’s two teen baristas, Oscar (Toby Hemingway) and Chloe (Alexa Davalos), who occasionally manage to stop pawing each other long enough to pour the odd mocha cappuccino.
You get the picture: Everyone’s connected, and each coupling represents another facet of that crazy fool thing the French call l’amour. Adapted by Allison Burnett from the novel by Charles Baxter, Robert Benton’s latest effort, which follows his ungainly screen version of Philip Roth’s The Human Stain, is a 10-course meal that most viewers will quickly come to wish had been served up smorgasbord-style, allowing them to grab the fresh, tasty items and leave the spoiled, rancid ones behind. I can’t remember when I last saw a movie so maddeningly inconsistent, with incisive observations and credible behavior pressed right up next to material so stupid it practically drools. And it’s all tied together—heavy sigh—via Freeman’s warm, homey voice-over narration, which always sounds exactly the same, whether he’s telling us about falsely convicted Shawshank inmates or the mating rituals of the Emperor penguin.
Benton’s 1994 film Nobody’s Fool features a shot of Bruce Willis sleeping on a couch, lying on his side, with both hands tucked snugly into his crotch—a common but funny-looking position that I’d never seen onscreen before and don’t believe I’ve seen since. Miniature truths like that are sprinkled throughout Feast of Love—particularly during the scenes between Diana and her married lover, in which the couple’s postcoital acrimony is accentuated by their casual nudity, which in this context somehow makes them both seem formidable rather than vulnerable. (I think it’s the way they walk around the room stark naked, arguing; Robert Altman used the same trick with Julianne Moore in Short Cuts.) Kinnear, who isn’t afraid to look weak or pathetic, gets a terrific scene in which his sister refuses to return the dog he stashed at her place after Kathryn left him—his nephew has now bonded with the mutt—and a subplot in which Oscar and Chloe decide to make an amateur porn video, which they figure will earn them extra cash while allowing them to share their passion with others, is rather touching in its hormonal naïveté.
But for every such moment, there’s a cornball bit of Freeman voice-over, or a painful contrivance, or poor Fred Ward, who hasn’t had a decent role since the early ’90s, lurching into the frame as Oscar’s cartoonishly vicious white-trash drunk of a dad. It’s one thing for Chloe to visit a psychic, who informs her with an ashen expression that Oscar will soon die; it’s another for the movie to take this prophecy seriously, thereby negating any sense that Feast of Love might be about real human beings and their genuinely thorny relationships. Benton doesn’t seem sure whether he’s making a piercing drama or a cozy fable, and winds up making both of them at once. If only I could think of a means for you to enjoy the former while skipping the latter.
Feast of Love
***
Morgan Freeman, Greg Kinnear, Radha Mitchell, Billy Burke
Directed by Robert Benton
Rated R
Opens Friday