Feast of Love

Films that aspire to do nothing more than explore the lives and loves of ordinary people are rare birds in the mainstream movie world these days. In this case, Feast of Love, which is based on Charles Baxter's 2000 best seller, is content examining the up-and-down relationships of a group of disparate souls living in Portland, Oregon, who are all trying to find answers to eternal questions about love. The film is anchored and narrated by Morgan Freeman, who teams with Jane Alexander as a couple trying to overcome the loss of a drug-addicted son. There's also a confused nice guy (Greg Kinnear) who loses his wife (Selma Blair) to another female, a conflicted woman (Radha Mitchell) caught up in an empty but sexually satisfying dead-end affair with a married man (Billy Burke), and a young girl (Alexa Davalos) experiencing an ill-fated romance with a troubled kid (Toby Hemingway). These are the human threads three-time Oscar-winning director Robert Benton (Kramer vs. Kramer) weaves to create a tapestry that's meant to tell us something significant about ourselves. Like any community there are people here you root for and others you can't stand to be around, but the movie deftly mixes small-town charm, complex drama, and wise insights into the mysteries of the heart. Did we mention there's also lots of sex and nudity? This is the kind of deliberately paced entertainment made by and designed for sophisticated adults tired of the superheroes, torture porn, and raunchy comedies that seem to dominate at the multiplex these days. It's thoughtful and literate enough to make it seem positively original.