Rather than a feast of love, I'd describe this film as an economy buffet of love and lust. The film is set in dark, rainy Portland, Oregon, centered in the Jitters coffee shop, with several interwoven stories: a semi-retired philosophy professor and his wife (Morgan Freeman and Jane Alexander) grieve for their promising young son who died of a drug overdose; the coffee shop owner (Greg Kinnear) takes for granted the love and affection of his young wife (Selma Blair), who surprises him by leaving him for another woman (Stana Katic); a coffee shop barrista (Toby Hemingway), with a congenital heart defect and a history of drug use, falls in love with a girl (Alexa Davalos) who's looking for a job; an angry, abusive father (Fred Ward) tries to control his son and frighten away his son's new girlfriend; a cynical, amoral real estate agent (Radha Mitchell) carries on an affair with a married man (Billy Burke) while pretending to be in love with the coffee shop owner.
The message in this film is that everyone is looking for love, and we all go about the search in different ways. While the acting is uniformly excellent, and the nudity and love scenes are vital to the storyline, the melodramatic screenplay has some uneven spots, and the production values clearly mark this as an independent production. Nevertheless, if you enjoy watching strong performances by Morgan Freeman and Greg Kinnear, and you like character-driven, multi-generational, adult romantic dramas such as In the Land of Women or The Jane Austen Book Club, I recommend you give Feast of Love a chance. Actual Portland filming locations include the Fresh Pot coffee shop on North Mississippi Avenue, the Reed College campus and PGE Park.
Labels: drama, lesbian, romance, rom-drama-faves
IMDb 66/100
MetaScore (critics=51, viewers=67)
RottenTomatoes Averages (critics=53, viewers=66)
James Berardinelli's 3 star out of 4 star review
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