This movie is about love relationship.That Feast of Love is an overstuffed melodrama, better suited for broadcast as a TV movie of the week than as a theatrical release.
That it comes from Robert Benton, a veteran whose output has slowly, steadily declined in quality since writing Bonnie and Clyde and writing and directing Kramer vs. Kramer, is just plain sad.
One (played by Selma Blair) abruptly leaves her husband (Greg Kinnear) for another woman - a stereotypical, softball-playing, predatory lesbian. Another (Alexa Davalos) consults a psychic about her blossoming romance with a fellow coffee house employee (Toby Hemingway), then goes into a tizzy of wedding and baby planning based on the forecast.
The worst (Radha Mitchell) is involved with a married man (Billy Burke), then marries Kinnear's character Bradley for stability rather than love, yet maintains the affair with this person who's quick to slap her across the face and call her the most profane word you can hurl at a woman.
In the middle of all this is Freeman's Harry Stevenson, a local philosophy professor and regular customer who watches all these people falling in and out of love.Freeman, he also provides warm, fatherly advice and plenty of voiceover, such as: ''Sometimes you don't know you've crossed a line 'til you're already on the other side.''
He and Alexander do have a couple of lovely scenes together, though, as a longtime married couple who get involved in everyone's lives to avoid the pain of grieving their dead son. They're the only ones at this feast who feel even remotely like real people, and they're the ones we see the least.
That it comes from Robert Benton, a veteran whose output has slowly, steadily declined in quality since writing Bonnie and Clyde and writing and directing Kramer vs. Kramer, is just plain sad.
One (played by Selma Blair) abruptly leaves her husband (Greg Kinnear) for another woman - a stereotypical, softball-playing, predatory lesbian. Another (Alexa Davalos) consults a psychic about her blossoming romance with a fellow coffee house employee (Toby Hemingway), then goes into a tizzy of wedding and baby planning based on the forecast.
The worst (Radha Mitchell) is involved with a married man (Billy Burke), then marries Kinnear's character Bradley for stability rather than love, yet maintains the affair with this person who's quick to slap her across the face and call her the most profane word you can hurl at a woman.
In the middle of all this is Freeman's Harry Stevenson, a local philosophy professor and regular customer who watches all these people falling in and out of love.Freeman, he also provides warm, fatherly advice and plenty of voiceover, such as: ''Sometimes you don't know you've crossed a line 'til you're already on the other side.''
He and Alexander do have a couple of lovely scenes together, though, as a longtime married couple who get involved in everyone's lives to avoid the pain of grieving their dead son. They're the only ones at this feast who feel even remotely like real people, and they're the ones we see the least.
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