By Marsha McCreadie

Feast of Love
Directed by Robert Benton


Morgan Freeman has portrayed God before, and he’s kinda at it again as he tries to fix the lives of others in Feast of Love. We should just go ahead and elect him as the country’s father figure; whenever you hear his reassuring tones, you know things will turn out as well as they possibly can. In Feast of Love, director Robert Benton’s movie about love’s liaisons and lesions, Freeman plays a college professor who listens and gives advice to the residents of an Oregon town, a shift from the Michigan locale of the novel by Charles Baxter, adroitly adapted here by Allison Burnett.

Not as incisive or suspenseful as his breakthrough, Kramer vs. Kramer, Feast of Love still shows that male directors and writers can get at relationship matters quite well. The rumor is that MGM has a target audience of women of a certain mature age for this film, and Benton has always been known for his abilities with “women’s issues”—though luckily, this time we don’t have Sally Field overplaying the emotional strings as she did in his Places in the Heart.

Good thing, too, because this community needs all the help it can get in the heart department, due to the abundance of all the crash and burn emotional mix-ups. Referencing A Midsummer’s Night’s Dream—though not as much as ads would lead you to believe—the locus of the movie is Jitters, a cleverly named coffeehouse run by Bradley (Greg Kinnear), whose wife (Selma Blair) has left him for another woman. He’s in the middle of a troublesome setup with Radha Mitchell, an edgily glittering real estate agent who sees no need to end her relationship with a married man. A third potential mate appears. What to do?

Yes, Harry Stevenson (Freeman) also has problems, but it’s not his strong marriage to the always wonderfully steadfast Jane Alexander. On sabbatical, he’s got the time and the maxims to fix others’ life problems. With the exception of fine actor Fred Ward, stuck as a stereotypical abusive father, the performances ring true. If the dialogue seems occasionally maudlin, a few jabs find their mark; for example: “I felt a harmonic convergence with this place.” If you’ve ever been to Oregon, you’ll know they do still talk this way.

Feast of Love is a feel-good movie for the semi-literati; as such it may grate on those too sophisticated for its smooth ways and easy answers. And though the pastoral setting of Oregon could stand for a magical forest, the occasional mismatches of Shakespeare’s comedy in the movie are, well, random. You know, like life—only framed by some trustworthy advice.