Robert Benton directed Feast of Love, an ensemble driven romantic melodrama, starring Morgan Freeman, Greg Kinnear, Radha Mitchell, Billy Burke, Selma Blair, Alexa Davalos, Toby Hemingway, and Jane Alexander.
Based on the 2000 novel “The Feast of Love,” by Charles Baxter, the tale deals with the many permutations of love.
Set within a community of friends in Portland, Oregon, it centers on Harry Stevenson, a local college professor, who provides narration about how love can affect one’s life.
Bradley
Bradley runs a small cafe in Portland. He has been married to his wife Kathryn for six years. Their marriage becomes strained when Kathryn begins a lesbian affair with Jenny, whom she meets playing softball. She leaves Bradley. The divorce affects him greatly, but he soon finds love again with Diana, a real estate agent who has a history with a married man named David. Though she ends her affair with David to marry Bradley, they ultimately declare they are in love with each other and Diana leaves Bradley, again devastating him. Now twice divorced, Bradley suffers an emotional breakdown and stabs himself in the hand. As his hand is being sutured at the hospital, he falls for his doctor, Margit. In the conclusion, the two are married.
Oscar and Chloe
Oscar, young man working at Bradley’s cafe, meets and falls in love with a girl named Chloe. However, Oscar is living with his alcoholically abusive father, Bat. When Chloe visits a fortune-teller, she is told that Oscar will die. Chloe straightens her resolve about her love for Oscar and their future together. Coming home, she urges Oscar to marry her immediately. At the wedding, Chloe reveals to Harry that she is pregnant, and plans to have another baby right after due to Harry’s advice of having “two.”
In the conclusion, everybody gathers for an afternoon in the park. While playing football, Oscar collapses; despite an attempt to get him to a hospital, congested traffic interferes, and he dies of a heart defect. Bat attempts to avenge his son’s death by harming Chloe but Harry scares him off, and then asks Chloe if he and his wife Esther can ‘adopt’ her as their own.
Diana and David
Diana, a successful realtor, has an affair with David, a married man for 11 years. Their relationship becomes more volatile when Diana begins dating Bradley and falls in love with him. David insists he loves Diana, but is unable to leave his wife. Diana marries Bradley and ends her affair with David. However, their love is later rekindled when Karen discovers her husband was cheating. Free at last, David and Diana have emotional confrontation that ends with a kiss that Oscar and Chloe happen to see, fueling their divorce and Bradley stabbing himself.
In the end, Diana and David are shown as functionally happy couple.
Harry and Esther
Harry and his wife Esther have been married a long time. Harry, a patron at Bradley’s cafe, provides the younger generation with advice on love. However, we learn that Harry and Esther are masking their own grief after the death of their adult son, Aaron. Harry reveals the nature of his son’s death to Chloe, whom he and Esther grow very close to. Harry has been struggling with going back to work as a professor at a university.
In the film’s conclusion, after Oscar’s death, Harry and Esther offer to adopt a now widowed and pregnant Chloe, who accepts their offer.
Cast
Morgan Freeman as Harry Stevenson
Greg Kinnear as Bradley Smith
Radha Mitchell as Diana Croce
Billy Burke as David Watson
Selma Blair as Kathryn Smith
Alexa Davalos as Chloe Barlow
Toby Hemingway as Oscar Gamlen
Jane Alexander as Esther Stevenson
Fred Ward as Bat Gamlen
Stana Katic as Jenny
Erika Marozsán as Dr. Margit Vekashi
Margo Martindale as Mrs. Maggarolia
