FEAST OF LOVE

a film review by Malik Isasis














I would watch Morgan Freeman in just about anything, and I have. As a filmmaker, one of the things I appreciate about Freeman is that it never seems like he is phoning in a performance. He is present no matter how absurd the story. Freeman seem to always rise above the material he’s in.

One of the most disturbing things about Freeman’s long illustrious film career in Hollywood is that he is usually the only African American person in his films. His characters walk about in the world completely disconnected from black heritage. This is a systemic issue in Hollywood. The reasoning: too many black people in a mainstream film would make it a “black film” therefore limiting its international sales. To a lesser extent, Will Smith and Denzel Washington also inhabit characters that are estranged from black America.

When I think of Morgan Freeman, I think of the extremity to which this is true. There are two exceptions that I can think of: Glory (1989) where he played a former slave drafted to fight with the Union against the Confederate Army. Denzel Washington was also a part of the cast. The second was Kiss the Girls (1997) where Freeman’s character’s niece was kidnapped.

This observation is limited only to Freeman’s film life.

Feast of Love

Feast of Love is a story about the intersecting, dysfunctional love lives of several urbanites who are trying to make life work.

Harry Stevenson (Morgan Freeman) a quietly grieving father of a son whose recent death to an overdose has caused him to take a permanent sabbatical from his professorship. He and his wife Esther (Jane Alexander) rarely discuss the grief that has interrupted their emotional and physical intimacy. Harry spends most of the film walking about observing people falling in and out of love and coming home and sharing his observations with his wife.

One of the people Harry observes is his friend Bradley (Greg Kinnear), a meek coffee-shop owner whose wife of six years, Katheryn (Selma Blair) is leaving him for another woman. From the start of the film, Katheryn is used more as a device. When she walks out of the door, she inexplicably never appears again in the film. When characters are thinly drawn this way the audience is stuck with narrow emotional choices.

Bradley quickly falls in love again with Diana (Radha Mitchell) only to have that relationship dissolve.

Then there are the young lovers Chloe (Alexa Davalos) and Oscar (Toby Hemmingway) who find one another in Bradley’s coffee shop under the watchful eyes of—you got it, Harry. Incidentally, Ms Davalos and Mr. Hemmingway have no screen chemistry.

Feast of Love is based on the 2000 novel by the same name. It feels like the script adaptation wanted to hit all the themes in the novel. The film spends very little time with its characters, which works against getting to know them; therefore it is difficult to emotionally invest in them.

I’m a big fan of happenstance, but the happenstances are too many to be credible. There was even dissonance in the love scenes and there were plenty with full on nudity. Even with the issues I had with the film structure and character development, I generally liked the film. There were moments where I thoroughly enjoyed what I was feeling. I have a bias toward films in this genre.

I don’t believe films are about perfection but making sure that there are more memorable moments than none, unfortunately, for Feast of Love the math does not add up in its favor.


Grade: C

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