Looking for Love in All the Wrong Faces

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The New York Sun

“An absence of disqualifiers is a rare and beautiful thing,” says the stoic and gentle philosophy professor Harry Stevenson (Morgan Freeman) who occupies the center of “Feast of Love.” Director Robert Benton’s new film itself deserves the same pragmatic and genuine, if not wildly effusive, praise. A narrative expedition that tracks a group of couples struggling to get and stay together, “Feast of Love” bears a circumstantial similarity to big-canvas social dramas like “Magnolia” and “Crash.” But Mr. Benton’s film, based on Charles Baxter’s well-regarded novel, possesses few of those previous films’ strident excesses and self-indulgent contrivances. Instead of fatefully and noisily uniting a disparate group of people through calamity and coincidence, “Feast of Love” diagrams and defines a Portland, Ore., community two people at a time as they are drawn together or driven apart by desire.

On sabbatical and at loose ends emotionally, Harry regularly frequents Jitters, a non-corporate coffee house that affords him a safe perch from which to watch love’s eternal pinball game without racking up any points himself. Jitters owner and operator Bradley (Greg Kinnear) is both blessed and cursed by a head-in-the-clouds romantic idealism that, though personally inspiring, is suffocating his wife Kathryn (Selma Blair) and has irrevocably soured their marriage. When Kathryn leaves him for Jenny, the leggy and confident shortstop on the Jitters women’s softball team, it is a shock to Bradley alone.

Even less surprising is the instant attraction shared by Chloe (Alexa Davalos) and Oscar (Toby Hemingway), two innocent young baristas whose corresponding emotional baggage makes them soulmates shortly after lust makes them bedmates. Meanwhile, Bradley rises from the ashes of marriage no. 1 and arrives at the threshold of marriage no. 2 in communion with Diana (Rhada Mitchell), a real estate agent with prickly intimacy issues who is secretly embroiled in an affair with married David (Billy Burke).

In a recent article in Bookforum, the writer and director Alexander Payne joined other filmmakers and writers in addressing the subject of novel adaptations. “Adapting often means marauding,” he wrote. He went on to describe the thought process behind streamlining a novel’s worth of characters into a screenplay’s far smaller word and page count: “‘I’ll take you and you and you and the rest of you can die, and I’m adding this and changing this and this but it’s for your own good.'”

Mr. Baxter’s 302-page “The Feast of Love” has been for the most part sympathetically marauded by scripter Allison Burnette. The novel’s Michigan becomes the Pacific Northwest, several personalities have been combined, and the book’s multiple first-person voices have been unified into Harry’s less intimate but more affectionate solo point of view. This fairly drastic weeding out has removed much of the novel’s engaging language and softened its characters’ edges. Harry and his wife Esther’s (the eternally poised Jane Alexander) contentious relationship with their son has, for instance, been radically defused, and Fred Ward winds up stranded in the thankless one-note role of Oscar’s abusive father, Bat. Exactly what it is that Diana sees in Bradley is also never adequately explained.

What the film’s audience sees in Bradley, Diana, David, Chloe, Oscar, Kathryn, and Jenny is another story. I can’t recall a recent Hollywood movie in which nudity was so unapologetically and unselfconsciously rampant. The actors’ natural comportment in the buff is a credit to their craft, their parentage, and their personal trainers. But like the rest of the modestly ingratiating qualities that elevate “Feast of Love” above the rest of the big-cast, book-based dramas, that it all fits together so cozily is a credit to Mr. Benton. His unpretentious ability to keep things tastefully moving forward is a skill he has regularly demonstrated since 1973’s “Bad Company.” The swanning camera and judiciously measured dramatic tempos of “Feast of Love” show him to be in top form as a craftsman with a humble yet personal touch.

In both subject matter and scope, “Feast of Love” might appear better suited to the more character-generous running time of the contemporary American cable series, rather than the often glib and shorthand intensive storytelling of the Hollywood multiplex. In incident and tone, the film bears more than a passing resemblance to HBO’s current clumsy relationship forensic “Tell Me You Love Me.” But even at a fraction of the length of an HBO show, “Feast of Love” digs deeper into love’s emotional clockworks than “Tell Me You Love Me” has managed in its inaugural three hours. As small-screen dramas like “Mad Men,” “Lost,” and “Battlestar Galactica” continue to outshine much of their big-screen rivals in vision, quality, and relevance, it’s nice to be able to say that “Feast of Love” inches the mainstream storytelling scales back over in favor of American movies.


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