Movie Review: Feast of Love

They say that as a filmmaker ages, his work matures with him, offering greater perspectives on all facets of life. While Robert Benton's keen filmic instincts have translated into impassioned intellect even as early as his 1978 Academy Award winner Kramer vs. Kramer, rather than wisdom, the filmmaker's most recent work, Feast of, Love seems to instead offer up drawn out life lectures.

In a small college town, an ostensibly happy professor, Harry (Morgan Freeman) uses his pristine marriage to offer up lessons of love to several generations in romantic flux. Bradley (Greg Kinnear), a coffee shop owner whose constant upbeat personality suggests perhaps a little too much caffeine in his diet, turns to Harry for advice after his first wife (Selma Blair) leaves him quickly for another woman, and his rebound fling (Radha Mitchell) refuses to extinguish her sexual encounters with her old flame. Chloe and Oscar (Alexa Davalos, Toby Hemmingway), two of Bradley's teenage employees, also turn to the aging teacher for advice on their blossoming young love.

Luckily for Benton, the blow of his haughty statements about the divine nature of love is lessened by the subtle and kind narration of Morgan Freeman. The performance Freeman gives as Harry, supplemented by Jane Alexander, who plays his wife Esther, is the course that holds this Feast of Love together. The actors dole out believable, yet humble advice in spite of the director's grand strokes.

Of course the ensemble cast surrounding Freeman and Alexander does exceptional work as well. Kinnear is so perfect in his portrayal of the everyday, nice guy it is scary. Radha Mitchell and Billy Burke are convincing as adulterous, jaded lovers. Selma Blair and Stana Katic, though only on screen for a short period of time, are wonderfully awkward as two women having their first lesbian encounter. Finally, the sappy young romance shared between Alexa Davalos and Toby Hemmingway is made palatable by the actors' chemistry, despite the foretelling of a trite, cosmic disruption that causes a bump in their life plans.