Feast of Love

Starring: Morgan Freeman, Greg Kinnear, Radha Mitchell, Billy Burke, Selma Blair, Alexa Davalos, Stana Katic, Toby Hemingway, Erika Marozsan, Fred Ward
Directed by: Robert Benton
Rating: R
Genre: Comedy, Drama, Romance
2007

Times Seen:
Tim: 1

Summary: Love and loss happens to a group of friends in Oregon.

Review:

Tim: There's just something about Feast of Love that I didn't like. Perhaps it starts with the title. This is promised to be a "feast" of love. We're not expecting a snack or a small meal. And yet, that's exactly what we get. The movie is short on delivering love. We get a bunch of stories around a group of people connected in some believable and some forced ways. It all feels like it's leading toward something, but the ultimate conclusion is a bit of a letdown.

I'll spend a few minutes touching on each of the storylines. The main one (or at least the most interesting one to me) is the series of relationships Greg Kinnear has in the film. Each one is supposed to tell us something about the nature of love. He starts out in a relationship with Selma Blair. It ends rather quickly, and I feel like there's an important lesson to be learned from this, but it all seemed so simplistic and so obvious. Blair isn't in the film long enough to make any kind of impact. He then has a relationship with Radha Mitchell, who connects him to a series of other characters. Mitchell is good in the film, but I was surprised at how much time she spent without any clothes on. She was seeing Billy Burke. I like Burke, and though he made his character a bit more multi-dimensional than it otherwise would have been. He works well with Mitchell and was believable in the role. Morgan Freeman is connected to multiple people and basically spends the movie walking around giving people advice. I was a bit confused on why he was so central to the story and why all these random people would gravitate toward him. There's also a story about two young people falling in love, played by Alexa Davalos and Toby Hemingway. Hemingway's dad is Fred Ward, and he's a real jerk. Stana Katic is in the film briefly, but I thought she did a good job.

All of these characters are connected in major or minor ways. The various stories don't all deliver the same results. Some are interesting, some are boring. The characters are decently developed, but no one really connects with the audience (Kinnear comes the closest). Morgan Freeman felt a bit out of place.

The movie goes on until the eventual conclusion, which contains a psychic's prediction, and some fairly melodramatic events that venture into sappy territory. I believe the rivals in love all make up at the end, or something to that that effect.

The problem I had with Feast of Love is that it never gave me the opportunity to see this characters as real. It all felt like a story, and one that was missing some key elements. The movie feels very small and independent, but it occasionally felt like a made-for-television affair (which isn't good). There was nothing specifically memorable about this movie at all. That's the biggest complaint I had. I didn't enjoy watching the movie. It simply wasn't enjoyable enough.

Rating 1-10
Tim's Rating: 5.5



If You Enjoyed This Movie, We Recommend: Nobody's Fool, The Human Stain, Places in the Heart