Opening Day: 21 February 2008

Synopsis:

From venerable Academy Award® winning director Robert Benton ("Kramer vs. Kramer"), comes a kaleidoscopic ode to life and love in all its funny, sad, sexy, crazy, heartbreaking and life sustaining facets: "Feast of Love." In a coffee shop in a tight-knit Oregon community, local professor Harry Stevenson (Academy Award® winner Morgan Freeman) witnesses love and attraction whipping up mischief among the town's residents. From the unlucky in love, die-hard romantic coffee shop owner Bradley (Academy Award® nominee Greg Kinnear) who has a serial habit of looking for love in all the wrong places, including with his current wife Kathryn (Selma Blair); to the edgy real estate agent Diana (Radha Mitchell) who is caught up in an affair with a married man (Billy Burke) with whom she shares an ineffable connection; to the beautiful young newcomer Chloe (Alexa Davalos) who defies fate in romancing the troubled Oscar (Toby Hemingway); to Harry himself, whose adoring wife (Jane Alexander) is looking to break through his wall of grief after the wrenching loss of a beloved... they all intertwine into one remarkable story in which no one can escape being bent, broken, befuddled, delighted and ultimately redeemed by love's inescapable spell.

Movie Review:

Feast of Love is not a show you'd watch with your girlfriend on Valentine's Day. Should you watch it, you'd feel the title borders on a obliquely risque double entendre attempt. Cobbled together are classic stereotypes of couple situations, relationships and "universal truths" about both men and women, mashed together in a multiple story style attempt we've seen ever so often in romantic dramas. Love Actually aced it beyond doubt, no doubt aided by sharp Brit wit and astute script and screenplay, complimented by suave directorial command. Feast of Love doesn't flop, but it clearer lacks any of these qualities.

Feast of Love is more like a feast of emotional flippancy, promiscuity and lots of nudity. Morgan Freeman's credible, assured and typically classy performance is swamped by an over dependence on cliched takes on relationships and love. Girl meets boy and they fall in lust, having sex at every opportunity, on one occasion on the field of a huge football stadium. A housing agent speaks of love for a lovelorn customer of hers - when their conversations don't extend past typical, everyday conversation - and does so in bed to a married man with whom she has a protracted sexual affair. Freeman stays clean from these icky business by playing a professor of philosophy who dishes out advice freely while innately struggling with personal issues of his own that belies his smooth, confident, fatherly outer appearance.

The pace of the movie is rapid, flitting between the three central stories that form the core of the film. The scripting and dialogue will manage to find a few connecting moments with anyone who's been through the frustrations of a relationship but the movie never ever rises above that. The women drop their clothes at almost every other scene, resulting in an inability for the audience to take any of them seriously. The other major crippling point is that of how the characters simply don't get fleshed out enough as the plot narrative moves along, worsened by the fact that the characters seem to regard sex as proper interaction and the main means of communication.

Ultimately Feast of Love trudges along like a bland romance flick so un-noteworthy you'll easy forget you even watched it. You won't remember the names of the characters and even the source of their conflicts and troubles in the film. Everything gets over ridden by the nudity in the film, which renders this as a shallow, undecided film that dispenses bland fare. That Freeman's regular level of performance could seem so cultured and assured speaks volumes about how everyone else in the film fail in comparision.

Movie Rating:




Review by Daniel Lim