PROLOGUE: I see a lot of new movies. Probably 90% of what comes through my local megaplex, along with a heavy sprinkling of indie and foreign stuff. However, I never saw so much as a preview or a poster for Feast of Love until it popped up in the theater last weekend. I was shocked that a movie starring, among others, Morgan Freeman and Greg Kinnear could fly so completely under my radar.
THE FILM: It’s an adaptation of a novel by the same name by Charles Baxter, which is itself a modern rewrite - set in present-day Portland, Oregon - of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. It’s a pretty loose rewrite; if I hadn’t known going in (via the synopsis on fandango.com) what the movie was, I don’t think I would have noticed the Shakespeare.
MY THOUGHTS: About halfway through the movie I found myself thinking, this is the best film I’ve seen all year. While set in an ostensibly normal, non-supernatural world, the entire movie is enormously sentimental, suffused with a warmth and sweetness that I found touching, but not cloying. The movie has a ton of R-rated depiction of sex, but isn’t ever exploitative - the sex scenes (and there are a good half-dozen) serve to reinforce the relationships between the characters, rather than simply titillate (not that there’s anything wrong with that, either!). The ensemble cast is flawless - a lot of this dialogue would have been a cheesy, pretentious trainwreck in the hands of lesser actors, but IMO this group pulls it off. Between the sentimental tone of the movie, and the fact that there are no real surprises in the plot, I think it took tremendous care on the part of the director and cast to make this movie work.
If anyone else has seen this movie, I’d love to hear what you think - even if you hated it. If you haven’t seen it yet, I recommend it highly.
