Misstropolis

Wednesday, September 19, 2007

Feast of Love

by Tom Meek

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Love is a fickle beast, or as Robert Benton’s adaptation of Charles Baxter’s novel has it, it’s the illusion of love that’s fickle. And beastly.

Much what goes on in Feast of Love feels like a “What happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas” commercial should the news of a transgression make it back to a concerned party. The complicated weave of cross threaded relationships in small town Oregon originates with Bradley Thomas (Greg Kinnear), a cheerily wimpy coffee shop owner who gets his heart broken only to set himself up to get it broken again, and so on.

The first time around, Bradley’s wife (Selma Blair) falls for another woman right under his nose; and when she finally comes clean she berates him for being so clueless and out of touch.

Bradley moves out, buys a new house and soon falls for his seductive realtor (Radha Mitchell), who of course is involved with a married man (Billy Burke). He’s in for heartache again; it’s hard to imagine why the poor sap can’t see it. She continues the tawdry and graphically rendered (the two spend a good deal of time naked in softly lit blue rooms) affair up to and through her marriage to Bradley. Strike two, and that’s not the end of it.

Various subplots seem poised more for shock than meaning. A young couple (Toby Hemingway and Alexa Davalos,) when not having sex on the fifty yard line of a cavernous football stadium or in the confines of their cramped boarding house, streams their sexcapades over the internet to scrap together enough cash to pursue their wholesome dreams. Add to that a few heroine doper tragedies and Fred Ward (wasted as a belligerent drunk with no redemptive prospects) and it’s American Beauty meets Ice Storm just not as well executed and with much more sex. All is not well under suburbia’s well manicured veneer—we get it.

Benton, who directed Kramer vs Kramer certainly knows domestic drama, but while Feast of Love offers a full spread of romantic theatrics, it still leaves us hungry. Bradley is such a milquetoast pushover he makes the viewer want to shout at the screen. He’s the embodiment of the film’s capacity to frustrate.

Thank God for Morgan Freeman’s divine presence as Harry Scott. As the town’s revered history professor who’s just lost his son, he provides the film’s voice-over with the omniscience of someone looking down from above (he did after all play God in the Almighty films). Harry is full of wisdom which Bradley ignores, misses, or fails to understand. Feast’s love is a fickle beast, and even with Freeman in top form, Benton’s mere mortals are no match for it.