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Feast of LoveDirected by Robert Benton

Written by Allison Burnett

Starring Morgan Freeman, Greg Kinnear and Radha Mitchell

Classification: 14A

Rating: **

An ensemble drama about the many facets of amour, Feast of Love poses one of those rhetorical questions that don't really make sense: “Is love just nature's plot to give us lots of screaming babies, or is it the only thing that matters?” asks Bradley (Greg Kinnear), the sad-sack romantic who keeps getting dumped by women he adores.

Could we please pick the middle door?

Based on the novel by Charles Baxter and marking similar territory to the Hugh Grant film Love, Actually, the movie follows several couples who frequent a Portland, Ore., coffee shop and who are observed by an author and literature professor named Harry Stevenson (Morgan Freeman, at his gravelly voice-over best).

Bradley is the proprietor of the café, a blinkered romantic who's more in love with the idea of love nd unaware that his wife, Kathryn (Selma Blair), has other desires. One day in a softball game, she gets tagged by an opposing shortstop (Stana Katic) and begins a lesbian affair. When he buys her a dog named Bradley Jr., ignoring the fact that she hates dogs, she dumps him. We have time for one languid shot of the two women in a post-sexual embrace before they disappear from the movie.

Though briefly devastated, Bradley soon finds a new lover, a blond ice-queen named Diana (Radha Mitchell), who's a real-estate agent who sells him a house and then moves in with him. She's the sort of woman who smokes and whose personality rhymes with “itch.” Though she pretends to love Bradley, she's in lust with a married man (Billy Burke). We're supposed to feel sorry for Bradley's bad luck with women, but Kinnear's performance is so overloaded with puppy-eyed pathos, you begin to understand why women like to hurt him.

The coffee shop is also the setting for a relationship between a troubled young coffee server, Oscar (Toby Hemingway), and Chloe (Alexa Davalos), who sees him through the window and applies for a job.

Finally, the professor has his own love story. His wife (Jane Alexander) is working hard to break through his wall of grief after the death of their son.

Feast of Love is directed by Robert Benton, famously one of the writers of Bonnie and Clyde and the director of Kramer vs. Kramer, but here he's showing his aging taste. Every woman except Jane Alexander appears naked at least once in the movie in the camera-friendly sex-on-top position. The movie begins to feel like a Playboy pictorial, but then, many things about the film seem similarly dated: Apparently the great threats to all young people are either heroin or pornographic sex tapes.

There's an occasional scene that works – a funny sequence where Bradley bargains for his dog with a kid – but as the movie progresses, the melodrama is piled on with a bulldozer. Oscar's drunken dad (Fred Ward) lurches around threatening people; a psychic card-reader predicts a tragedy; Bradley moves into an evil house; and the movie begins to feel more like a buffet of contrivance than a feast of love.

“Sometimes you don't know you've crossed a line ‘til you're already on the other side,” Freeman's character says philosophically.

And sometimes, you know a movie's going way over the line long before it gets there.