Feast of Love

By Linda Winsh-Bolard


"They say that when the Greek gods were bored, they invented humans. Still bored, they invented love. That wasn't boring, so they tried it themselves. And then they invented laughter -- so they could stand it."
This is how professor Harry Stevenson {Morgan Freeman} narrates the opening of the film.

In its own way, the film attempts to follow the legend.

Harry and his wife Esther (Jane Alexander) are mature, well to do couple, clearly loving and understand each other well. Watching them and listening to the off hand wise comments uttered by Harry on behalf of the confused lovers, you nearly miss a shadow of sadness hovering over them.

Coffee shop owner, and sometimes painter, Barney (Greg Kinnear) also loves his wife Kathryn (Selma Blair), or so he thinks and says; yet he does not seems to see her at all. He sees, as many who are in love do, internally and externally what he wants to see, and ends up surprised by losing her without even noticing that anything was wrong.

Not able to fight for her, Barney fights to get his dog back. It's a cute poochie, after all.

Then there is Diana (Radha Mitchell) a real estate agent who smokes organic cigarettes. And David Watson (Billy Burke), these two are having seemingly shallow affair full of sex and wine, and one of them is always married. Until the end of the film, that is.

Naturally star-crossed lovers, cannot be missing; Oscar (Toby Hemingway) and Chloe (Alexa Davalos) represent love at first sight and prognosis of early end. In a way, Chloe is the character that somewhat matches Harry Scott's courage and wisdom. Of course, she was given some room to do so.

Poor Barney was not; his character carries on with the most worn-out cliches Hollywood and popular culture produced, and to his great credit he does it without becoming ridiculous. Odd, corny, perhaps implausible but not utterly ridiculous. This is not because of the script which clearly was written for a shallow, selfish, all male character. That Kinnear managed to give Barney humanity, confusion and some depth is a great achievement.

Chloe and Oscar have it relatively easy; they are the lovers overcoming obstacles until the death parts them.

Morgan has such a personality that he can utter things like: "people are made for one another, Oscar and Chloe were made for one another and they knew it", and make them sound natural. Of course, he gets lots of practice playing wise humans and equally wise God. That is what talent and experience do for you.

There really should be an Oscar for people acting out well impossible lines, and one for directors turning trite, shallow scripts into passable films as well.

In this particular case, it is a pity that a film, shot in short sequences of different love stories, succumbed to the Hollywood required sentimentality, corny talk and naive interaction resulting in Harlequin like romance and the inevitable good end for all, where there was a potential, in the original idea, for a solid human story.

The cast and director Robert Benton truly try their best, and because of them we have light entertainment movie with some pretensions to better genre. Had the slicer came down on the sugar candy coating, and the film kept to the meandering, endless highway of natural life- what a pleasurable film we might have been watching.

Based on a book by Charles Baxter, screenplay by Allison Burnett, with very romantic music score by Stephen Trask.