KEY POINTS:
Rating: * *
Verdict: Days of Our Lives with lots of nudity. Sentimental eyewash.
To judge by online excerpts, Charles Baxter's 2000 novel, this film's source, is written in slim and muscular prose, the tone by turns intimate, humorous and bracingly insightful. A series of vignettes on affairs of the heart, it is called The Feast of Love and the omission of that "the" in the film's title signals its dismal absence of wit. Feast of Love is the title of a bad soft-porn movie, and that's half of what this is - Days of Our Lives, with nudity and a nice soundtrack (Jeff Buckley's version of Hallelujah; a snatch of Falling Slowly); the other half is crappy philosophising that has as much conceptual pungency as a greeting card.
Benton (the writer of Bonnie and Clyde and writer-director of Kramer vs Kramer, both classics of their genres) drops in and out of the lives of half-a-dozen variously lovelorn residents of Portland, Oregon. Bradley (Kinnear), who runs a coffee shop, sits in a bar with his arm draped around his girlfriend Kathryn (Blair) and doesn't notice that Jenny (Katic) is racing her off. Abandoned, he races into the arms of Diana (Mitchell), who's having an affair with David (Burke). Chloe (Davalos) and Oscar (Hemingway) are young and so much in love that you just know it's all going to end badly.
Through all this mush wades Harry (Freeman, Hollywood's go-to-guy for wrinkly-sage roles), a professor with a dark grief of his own, dispensing homespun wisdom to everyone and nodding wisely when (almost) everything turns out as he predicted. It's an inane spin on A Midsummer Night's Dream - the only reason Harry can't say "Lord, what fools these mortals be!" is that he's not a fairy - and a good reason to read a book rather than go to the movies.
Peter Calder
Cast: Morgan Freeman, Greg Kinnear, Radha Mitchell, Jane Alexander, Alexa Davalos, Toby Hemingway, Selma Blair, Stana Katic, Billy Burke
Director: Robert Benton
Running time: 102 mins
Rating: R16 (violence, offensive language, sex scenes)
Screening: Rialto
