Feast of Love

We went looking for a comedy, but ended up at a screening of a tear-jerker, ‘Feast of Love’. The movie is centered around Greg Kinnear’s character Bradley Thomas as he stumbles through a couple of heartbreaks on his way to true love. The sad-faced Bradley is saddled with a couple of the cliches of modern romantic comedy - his first wife dumps him for her lesbian lover, while the second, a blonde bombshell, treats the marriage as a pit stop on her way to true love with someone else’s husband. The fact that he eventually finds his soul mate in the hospital emergency ward, a beautiful doctor with a sexy accent who sews up his self-inflicted pinkie wound of love, is just the last hard-to-believe scene in his three-act play.

The moral focus of the story is supplied by the supernaturally-wise Morgan Freeman, whose character can spot a love affair blooming before the participants themselves realize it. His character, along with his wife played by Jane Alexander, are grieving over the recent loss of their son. The two actors portray this struggle with heartfelt dignity, even as the storyline drifts into melodrama and Morgan Freeman is allowed to show off his deft boxing skills.

The third couple highlighted in the film is young and beautiful, featuring a guy saddled with a junkie past and an one-dimensional, violent, alcoholic father, and a girl with no history to speak of (at least as far as the script was concerned). The message here seems to be that true love requires a blind eye to misfortune, even if it needed a convenient trip to a fortune-teller to deliver it.

Unfortunately, it is these devices of the obvious - the silly fortune-teller - the evil, stupid father - the plethora of gratuitous female nudity - that ultimately undermine the theme of love that this film attempts to celebrate. A Feast of Love does not reach the sumptuous heights it is clearly aiming for. Rather, it would seem more at home in the fast-food-courts that inhabit the same malls as the cineplex’s that are showing this film.