Everyone thinks they know what love is, until life happens and then they don’t. But what is love? Is it the spark when lovers touch – a chemistry? Is it the tiny acts of affection? The act of making love? Or is love simply an abstract, truly impossible to describe but ever so easy to feel?
Throughout history, films have tried surmounting the challenge of describing the essence of love, such as in 2003’s “Love Actually,” one of the better – if not the best – romantic comedy in recent years.
“Feast of Love,” the most recent cinematic effort to decipher romance, apes the latter, and is superior work, including the interlocking story lines and voiceover narration.
Viewers shouldn’t blame Robert Benton, the “Feast of Love” director who is most memorable for the exquisite “Kramer vs. Kramer,” for using a narrator in his movie, especially when that narrator is Morgan Freeman. Freeman (of “Se7en,” “The Shawshank Redemption” and “Million Dollar Baby”) plays Harry, an old professor who begins the film by retelling the Greek myth in which the gods, out of boredom, created humans, love and then laughter to put with love.
Since this cute, little fairy tale opens the film, it seems odd that the screenwriter forgot to add any humor – well, intentional humor. There are cliche lines that are supposed to be tragic such as, “Sometimes you don’t know you’ve crossed a line until you’re on the other side” (from another Freeman voiceover).
The only thing that saves this train wreck is the acting, which is phenomenal mainly because the players had such terrible material to work with.
Greg Kinnear, from the indie hit “Little Miss Sunshine,” plays Bradley with such honesty, frustration and despair that it’s almost disarming.
It’s just hard to believe the emotion when his storyline consists of sitcom jokes. His first wife leaves him for another woman and his second wife leaves him too, only to have Harry say, “At least it was a man this time.”
Bradley, happily, learns to love again, but the path to romantic fulfillment is filled with too many gag-triggering lines to make it credible.
Something equally as nauseating as the writing – and much more distracting – is the excessive nudity. I’m no prude, but when actor Billy Burke and Radha Mitchell are trying to be angry with each other, they start slapping one another and their genitalia start jiggling.
Honestly, the only redeeming quality of this mess is Freeman, as his character gives advice to everyone. Harry and his wife, Esther (Jane Alexander) are like Greek gods looking down at love and commenting on it.
The whole movie would’ve been better if the stories had taken place with the audience seeing them from Harry’s point of view.
If you need some melodramatic, interlocking storylines about romantic relationships, go rent “Love Actually” instead, or watch “Desperate Housewives.”
You won’t need a barf bag.
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