Playing a canny old papa bear dispensing nuggets of advice to a flock of unruly cubs in Feast of Love, Morgan Freeman, Hollywood's sage for all seasons, has a role he could act in his sleep. Early in this serious comedy, directed by Robert Benton and adapted by Allison Burnett from Charles Baxter's popular 2000 novel, The Feast of Love, Freeman's character, Harry Stevenson, observes that when the Greek gods were bored, they invented humans. Still bored, they invented love, which wasn't boring, so they tried it too. Then they invented laughter so they could stand it.
Harry is a semi-retired philosophy professor living in Portland, Oregon, with his stately wife, Esther (Jane Alexander). The recent death of their only son, Aaron, from a heroin overdose has shaken, but not shattered, them. They carry on like benign surrogate parents, or therapists, solemnly monitoring the behavior of the film's mixed-up younger folks.
Remarks about Greek gods and the foibles of humanity may have their place over brandy and cigars. But despite the kindly gravity Freeman puts into them, they sound portentous and condescending in the context of Feast of Love, a hollow contrivance masquerading as a wise and witty contemporary gloss on A Midsummer Night's Dream. This is a movie in which the characters' beliefs in haunted houses and fortune-telling are taken half-seriously. Benton, now in the twilight of a distinguished career (Kramer vs. Kramer, Places in the Heart), should have known better.
Harry's superior insight is first glimpsed in Jitters, a Starbucks-like coffee shop owned by his friend Bradley (Greg Kinnear), who boasts of his perfect marriage to Kathryn (Selma Blair). The three of them are having coffee when Jenny (Stana Katic), seen in a women's baseball game moments earlier, plunks down beside Kathryn and puts the moves on her under her husband's nose.
Bradley is oblivious, but Harry notices. When Kathryn storms out of the house to live with Jenny not long afterward, Harry gently tells Bradley that the evidence was right in front of his eyes, if he had bothered to look.
Kinnear, like Freeman, is recycling a stereotype he has played before: a bland, wagging puppy who is smugly clueless and (despite one sweaty lovemaking scene) sexless. Bradley's tinny shtick becomes the movie's theme: Is love just nature's plot to give us lots of babies, or is it the only thing that gives our crazy lives any meaning? It could be a Barry Manilow song.
Even after Bradley's eyes have been opened, he goes on to repeat a variation of the same mistake. He meets and marries Diana (Radha Mitchell), a beautiful real estate agent who has been carrying on an affair with a married man (Billy Burke) that is too hot to give up. When these dogs in heat get riled up, they slap each other in the face. Bradley would sooner die than slap anyone in the face.
The marital woes of this cardboard man are the rickety spine around which the movie spins its undercooked dramas. (Another thing undermining Feast of Love is the proliferation of multi-character stories on television that allow room for character development.) The least satisfying story line involves Oscar (Toby Hemingway), an ex-jock and recovering heroin addict in his late teens who works in Jitters, and Chloe (Alexa Davalos), a new girl in town with whom he falls in love the moment she enters the shop. Oscar lives with his abusive father (Fred Ward), a mean, knife-wielding drunk. To stay out of his reach, the cash-starved lovers resort to making a pornographic video, of which a tidbit is shown.
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