Feast of Love

Back with another stately if ultimately underwhelming literary adaptation, director Robert Benton’s choice of material here is something of an enigma. The director of Kramer vs. Kramer, Billy Bathgate, and The Human Stain is also well known as the screenwriter of Bonnie and Clyde, a film infused with an urgency that must be attributed mostly to director Arthur Penn. Even at his best, Benton’s films have a demure, laid-back quality that often sacrifices the density and texture of his top-notch source materials. This was never more evident than in his timid, uninvolving adaptation of Philip Roth’s masterful The Human Stain, and although I haven’t read Charles Baxter’s novel Feast of Love, I suspect that Mr. Benton hasn’t quite captured the appeal of this National Book Award-nominated novel.

As the film opens, a Portland, Oregon, coffeehouse owner (Greg Kinnear) is happily married to a beautiful young softball player (Selma Blair) who quickly develops the hots for her opposing team’s shortstop (Stana Katic) after a particularly rough tag at second base. The sexless Kinnear character is completely unaware, but not his older, philosophy professor buddy Harry (Morgan Freeman), who watches the sultry lady seduce the married woman at a local bar as the four sit together in a booth, right “underneath her husband’s nose,” he tells his own wife (Jane Alexander), both of whom are dealing with the recent drug-overdose death of their only son in disparate, conflicting ways.

The narrative of the film follows Kinnear from one romance to another (the Blair character inexplicably disappears from the film at this point) and picks up a subplot involving his pair of employees, David (Toby Hemingway) and Chloe (Alexa Devalos) who fall for each other at first sight through the Starbucksesque coffeehouse’s oversized windows. David lives with an abusive father (Fred Ward), and the couple’s attempts at self-sufficiency through various means (including making a pornography tape) is intercut with Freeman and Alexander’s wandering toward some sort of catharsis and Kinnear’s eventual marriage to Diana (Radha Mitchell, never more glamorous), who, in turn, despite her affection for Kinnear’s Bradley, carries on an affair with a married man (Billy Burke) who does all the right things to her beneath and above the sheets.

The film is loaded with grace moments and bathed in golden light but in the end is emotionally overcooked and essentially banal.  Despite its admirable lack of cynicism and a genuine humanistic impulse on the part of the director, these characters never jump off the screen. Benton’s camera never tires of watching his beautiful cabal of actresses in various forms of sexual embrace, but the film feels unattached to contemporary anxieties involving courtship, marriage, and urbanity.

                                                       Brandon Harris