The moment Morgan Freeman appeared onscreen in the first scene of Feast of Love, I said to myself, “If he starts narrating, I’m gonna scream.” And sure enough, not ten seconds later, Freeman’s voiceover started—he was saying something about how the Greek gods invented love in order to keep themselves from being bored, and then, after love was invented, they invented laughter just so they could cope with it.”Well, there’s a lot of love onscreen in Feast of Love—seven different couples, by my count. There’s not a huge amount of laughter, although I did enjoy the scene where Greg Kinnear, whose wife has just left him for another woman, is so desperate for companionship that he sneaks into his sister’s house and kidnaps her dog. And once Freeman’s narration lets up, there’s so much love and laughter—not to mention a lot of pretty actresses who director Robert Benton was able to talk into taking their clothes off—that I was definitely never bored.
The film is set among a loose community of friends and lovers in Portland, Oregon. Kinnear is Bradley, the owner of the local coffee shop, a nice, cheerful guy with spectacularly bad judgment when it comes to women: after the lesbian wife, he begins dating a real estate agent (Radha Mitchell), not realizing that she’s embroiled in a deeply toxic affair with a married man filled with even more self-loathing than she is. Two of Bradley’s employees are also in love: Oscar (Toby Hemingway) is a former heroin addict trying to scrape together enough cash to move away from his mean sonuvabitch of a dad (Fred Ward), and Chloe (Alexa Davalos), who wants to help him so badly that she’s even willing to make a sex tape with him and sell it over the internet. She’s even the one who suggests the idea! And Freeman is the wise, gentlemanly figure who all the characters turn to for advice—at the end of the day, he goes him to his wife Esther (Jane Alexander), tells her all about it, and if he’s seen anyone fall in love, he has a ritual where he pours two glasses of wine so they can celebrate.
I know: awwww. But if a lot of the characters in Feast of Love seem a little too good-hearted to be true, Benton and screenwriter Allison Burnett (adapting a novel by Charles Baxter) make sure that enough bad things keep happening to them to keep the film from getting too cloying. Kinnear’s heart gets broken repeatedly, another character dies, and even Freeman turns out to be quietly carrying around so much pain over the death of his son that he hasn’t been able to set foot in his classroom and face all those young faces for more than a year. It’s an Oregon movie: even on the sunny days, it’s always threatening to rain.
Benton has collaborated several times over the last decade with the novelist Richard Russo, and Feast of Love shares many virtues with Russo’s books—a wry, low-key sense of humour, a generous tolerance for people’s flaws, a sense that we’re not so much watching a plot unfold as we are simply hanging out in a neighbourhood for a little while and going people-watching. Sure, the stuff with Oscar and Chloe is pretty risible, but you feel like Benton genuinely likes these characters, and that he's rooting for them to find a way through their unhappiness. If there’s anything wrong with the film, it’s that it’s maybe a little too mild, a little too gentle—Benton tends to only hint at the story’s darker or gloomier aspects and leave it at that.
But I guess that’s what happens when you let Morgan Freeman narrate your movie. Those familiar, comforting cadences emanating from the theatre speakers do have a way of chasing the shadows from the room, don’t they?
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