Feast of Love

Feast of Love isn’t just bad because it is poorly written, although that’s one of its bigger problems. But we’ll get to its shortcomings in a bit. On the plus side, the acting is fine, the visuals are lovely, there are more than a few nude shots happily fulfilling my own personal desire for more gratuitous nudity in film. The pacing is a little slow, but it never quite falls into plodding. That’s the good.

Sad, then, that stilted, uneven dialog conspires with a strange landscape of characters of depth in sharp relief against cardboard cutouts that flit through the movie with hardly a sense of humanity to them. Some of the characters--an alcoholic father, in particular comes to mind--never feel real enough to achieve the kind of importance they come to play, so the emotional response is muted. Feast of Love’s biggest sin, though, is it’s moral confusion.

At one point in the film, Morgan Freeman’s wizened professor tell’s Greg Kinnear’s sadsack romantic that he can’t be angry at the failure of his wives’ sense of fidelity. After all, you can’t blame someone for falling in love. But the act of betrayal--the cruelties, lies, selfishness, and the betraying of marriages, trust, spouses, and children are brushed aside as all the couples become friends in the end. It’s a squeaky clean lie that doesn’t acknowledge the truth of the pains and angers and arguments over CDs, bills, and alimony that come with ruined marriages in real life. It’s a lie of the common era, though, that advocates a nebulous personal fulfillment above the stark and hard realities of personal responsibility--a failing, then, not of this movie, but of this culture of “finding your bliss” that has somehow made abandoning families and children into a semi-heroic stance against old notions of what constitute marriage, fidelity, love, and honor.

This is a horrific twisting of the world. And while this movie doesn’t make heros of its cheating and tortured cast, it does end up letting almost all of them off the hook for their selfishness--except for Greg Kinnear who thoughtlessly buys his wife a dog. Symbolically, he’s portrayed as the bad guy for this act (and it is, indeed, thoughtless), but she is portrayed as a fine specimen of grown up for leaving him for another woman. Brilliant.

With Morgan Freeman--who has come to occupy the position of God’s own voice in US cinema--telling us in kindly voiceover’s that everything is alright, the reality is scrubbed free of an authentic sense of the weight of failed relationships. In place of that burden is the ethereal lightness of Hollywood’s new adult: free from real responsibility, not living in a world many of us working class prols would recognize, and smiling with kind arrogance on those of us below who dare to believe that greatness comes when your personal fulfillment doesn’t come at the expense of the lives around you.

Please avoid.