Am I the only one who checks out of a movie the moment Morgan Freeman starts to narrate it? That warm, gravelly voice, redolent of patience and wisdom, sounds exactly the same whether it's describing the travails of falsely convicted Shawshank inmates or the mating rituals of the Emperor penguin. In the new romantic roundelay Feast of Love, Freeman's character, a college professor named Harry, is mourning the recent death of his only child, which has put considerable strain on his longtime marriage to Esther (Jane Alexander). But that doesn't stop Harry from noticing — and commenting wryly upon — the various passionate shenanigans taking place at Jitters, his favorite coffee shop. The joint's earnest, puppyish owner, Bradley (Greg Kinnear), has just lost his wife (Selma Blair) to another woman (Stana Katic), and is now on the rebound with Diana (Radha Mitchell), a pragmatic real-estate agent who can't seem to extricate herself from her strictly sexual, bad-news relationship with a married man (Billy Burke). And Harry also takes an understandably paternal interest in two teen baristas, Oscar (Toby Hemingway) and Chloe (Alexa Davalos), who occasionally manage to stop pawing each other long enough to pour the odd mocha cappucino.
Adapted by Allison Burnett from the novel by Charles Baxter, Robert Benton's latest effort follows his ungainly screen version of Philip Roth's The Human Stain. It's a ten-course meal that most viewers will quickly come to wish had been served up smorgasbord-style, allowing them to grab the fresh items and leave the rancid ones behind. I can't remember when I last saw a movie so maddeningly inconsistent, with incisive observations and credible behavior pressed right up next to material so stupid it practically drools. Diana's furtive meetings with her married lover feel authentically ugly and self-destructive, with the couple's postcoital acrimony accentuated by their casual nudity, which in this context somehow makes them both seem formidable rather than vulnerable. (I think it's the way they walk around the room stark naked, arguing; Altman used the same trick with Julianne Moore in Short Cuts.) But for every such moment, there's a cornball bit of Freeman voiceover, or a painful contrivance, or poor Fred Ward, who hasn't had a decent role since the early '90s, lurching into the frame as Oscar's cartoonishly vicious white-trash drunk of a dad. Benton doesn't seem sure whether he's making a piercing drama or a cozy fable, and winds up making both of them at once. If only you could enjoy the former while skipping the latter. — Mike D'Angelo