Movie Review: Feast of Love

Feast of Love (2007) 

Directed by Robert Benton 

Written by Allison Burnett, Charles Baxter

Starring Morgan Freeman, Alexa Davalos, Greg Kinnear, Selma Blair

Release Date September 27th, 2007

Published October 14th, 2007

Frustrating, maddening, endlessly watchable. These are my impressions of the movie Feast of Love from director Robert Benton. Watching this trainwreck of romantic goofiness, supernatural hooey and a whole lot of nudity, is both a pain and a pleasure. Great characters mix with bad characters in a script that is a maddening mix of foibles and quirks.

Professor Harry Stevenson (Morgan Freeman) has that qulaity that draws people to him. They reveal to him things they might not reveal to anyone else. His sage wisdom and reassuring gaze mask a personal pain he doesn't share but that does give him an insightful sadness that aides him in seeing things others may have missed.

That is what happens when he joins his friend Bradley (Greg Kinnear) and Bradley's wife Kathryn (Selma Blair) for a drink. While Bradley yammers away about nothing, Kathryn locks eyes with Jenny (Stana Katic) and it's love at first sight. Harry see's it right away, though he doesn't feel it's his place to explain it to Bradley. Atleast, when Bradley does find out, Harry is there with more sage advice.

Bradley unfortunately, is not someone for whom advice is all that helpful. When he meets Diana (Radha Mitchell), it's clear she's not in his league but he pursues anyway. Diana encourages Bradley's affection but she's also sleeping with David (Billy Burke). Bradley might notice this if he weren't a pathetic puppy dog, desperate to be loved.

Also hovering in Harry's sphere are Oscar (Toby Hemingway) and Chloe (Alexa Davalos). Oscar works in Bradley's coffee shop and when the flakey, beautiful Chloe, pronounced by her as Chlo-ah, wanders in wanting a job, despite a lack of experience or even vague knowlege of coffee, he practically climbs over the counter to tackle Bradley to get her hired. Harry see's it right away, love at first sight strikes again.

Feast of Love was directed by Robert Benton whose best remembered as the director of Kramer Vs Kramer. That cultural touchstone was the last time Benton was relevant. Since then his career has meandered from one forgettable film to the next. That career track is oddly like Feast of Love which meanders from one slightly interesting character to the next uncovering truths here and there but failing  to become relevant.

Obsessed with sex, Benton stuffs the screen with female nudity and simulated coitus. There is certainly nothing wrong with sex on screen. The problem with Feast of Love is Benton's obsession with showing it at the most inopportune or unnecessary moments. There is a lovely scene between Toby Hemingway and Alexa Davalos that features a very erotic sex scene and evolves into this lovely emotional moment and then it's undone by Benton's need to include one last shot of the young couple having sex.

That is part of a maddening pattern that unfolds in Feast of Love. Nice moments undone by Benton's lust for his female cast members. I won't argue that Alexa Davalos, Radha Mitchell, Selma Blair and Stan Katic are great to look at but at some point I want more information than how great they look during sex or just standing around nude.

I don't want to create the impression that Feast of Love is of porno quality. My issue is not with the amount of nudity but the context of the nudity and the distractive quality of it. There are some lovely moments of romance and insight hidden within this odd duck of a movie. Those scene however get lost in the naked flesh and under explored characters of Feast of Love.

The cast of Feast of Love is for the most part terrific; especially Morgan Freeman. Admittedly, the role of the sage, grandfatherly old friend is becoming something of a cliche. Freeman however, is so good you can easily forget how familiar this character is. Freeman is such a reassuring and warm presence that you forgive him and through him forgive the movie, many transgressions.

Freeman does elegant, romantic work with Jane Alexander who plays his wife. The only character who understands his deep inner pain, because she shares it, Alexander is patient but concerned as she watches her husband bide his time observing the lives of others without turning that insightful eye on his own life; slowly passing him by.

Greg Kinnear on the other hand suffers at the hands of a character so wishy washy and walked upon that you can't believe one woman, let alone the three women in the film, would be willing to be with him. First there is Selma Blair's Kathryn who, after several years of marriage, finds she is attracted to women. This is not unprecedented however as it plays in Feast of Love her decision is predicated more on the aesthetically pleasing girl/girl sex scene than on a truthful understanding of character.

Then there is Radha Mitchell's Diana. Clearly out of Charlie's league, she is busily sleeping with a married man and takes to Kinnear's Charlie out of spite for her married paramour played by Billy Burke. So, she's a conniving bitch and Charlie is a dunderheaded fool. Not much fun about this relationship and very poorly explored and played in Feast of Love.

That Mitchell plays this role well is a compliment to her talent. She plays this role in much more interesting and challenging fashion however in Woody Allen's underrated Melinda and Melinda.

There is yet a third woman thrown at Kinnear in Feast of Love but the less said about her, the better.

Feast of Love is not a terrible movie just a misguided one. There is insight, humor and romance in the mix it's just lost in the malaise of an unformed idea. Director Robert Benton has something to say about life, love, loss and other such L words, he just isn't quite sure what he wants to say or how to say it. Benton remains a skilled director but his skills are at a loss to match whatever his ambitions were in Feast of Love.

Movie Review The Human Stain

The Human Stain (2003) 

Directed by Robert Benton 

Written by Nicholas Meyer 

Starring Anthony Hopkins, Nicole Kidman, Ed Harris, Gary Sinise 

Release Date October 31st, 2003 

Published November 4th, 2003 

This is truly one of the worst titles you've ever seen. It's made worse by the fact that it is only part metaphor and does in fact refer to the gutter-minded definition your so ashamed to ascribe it. In his 2000 novel The Human Stain, writer Phillip Roth makes it clear that his title refers to that infamous blue dress owned by Monica Lewinsky. Yes there is a deeper metaphorical meaning to the title for the books characters but it's the Monica definition that people come away with and in so doing, forget that there is a rather compelling drama behind that title.

For the film adaptation of Roth's novel, director Robert Benton may have been better off without the literal title. The film is all about the metaphor with little mention of Roth's contempt for the Clinton impeachment and to his book’s first act plot point. You shouldn't judge a book (or movie) by it's title but in this case it's hard not to. So many people will avoid seeing this film because of that title that it renders the whole thing meaningless.

Coleman Silk (Sir Anthony Hopkins) has, in his time as Dean of Classics at Berkshire College, turned the sleepy small town institution into the shadow of an Ivy League University. In so doing he has made many friends and many more enemies. Therefore, it's not surprising then that when he makes one seemingly minor mistake on the eve of his retirement that his enemies seize upon it to get rid of him early.

Coleman's mistake was referring to a pair of students who never showed up in his class as "spooks.” Coleman's reference was to the ghostly definition of the word but because the missing students were African-Americans a complaint was filed and some people seized on the other definition of the word spooks as a racial epithet. And so it is that the very people Coleman himself hired at the college that shove him out the door.

The controversy is ironic because Coleman himself is African-American though you would not know it to look at him. He has for most of his 71 years passed himself off as Jewish and because of his light skin has never had to admit to anyone he is black. Coleman never told his wife of more than 40 years or his colleagues at the college or his closest friend a writer, Nathan Zuckerman (Gary Sinise), who after Coleman's death must piece his life together from the scraps of lies and half truths he left behind.

Coleman's death is another great source of controversy. After quitting his job, losing his wife to an embolism and becoming a pariah in his small town, Coleman takes up a scandalous affair with Faunia Farley (Nicole Kidman) a woman half his age, divorced and working as a janitor at the college. Faunia's ex-husband Les (Ed Harris) is a Vietnam veteran and highly unstable.

The situation that Coleman has placed himself in is one that is obviously dangerous. It's a situation that someone of his dignity and intelligence should never find himself in, as his friends including Nathan and his Lawyer Nelson Primus (Clark Gregg) remind him constantly. However as Faunia tells him when they first meet, action is the enemy of thought. Coleman acts without thinking allowing lust to overcome logic. Whether or not Coleman and Faunia can achieve something beyond lust is one of the film’s central questions.

Parallel to the main love story is Coleman's history. Flashbacks take us back 50 years to when Coleman (played in the past by newcomer Wentworth Miller) first decided his life would be easier if lived as a white Jew. While attending school in New York City, Coleman meets a beautiful Midwestern blonde named Steena Paulson (Jacinda Barrett). Steena has no idea that Coleman is African-American, she assumes he is Jewish which explains his ethnic looks. It seems like true love but when Coleman brings Steena home to meet his mother, he gets his first lesson in why his life might be easier if he pretended he was someone else.

The backstory is actually far more interesting than the central love story. Wentworth Miller and Jacinda Barrett light up the screen with a fiery chemistry. Ms. Barrett is particularly surprising as she pulls off the wide-eyed innocence of a mid twentieth century Midwesterner. Until now she has been cast as sexpots, typecast from her time as a one the over-sexed simpletons on MTV's The Real World (she was in the London cast).

Of course, Sir Anthony Hopkins and Nicole Kidman make strong impressions, they are terrific actors. Their plot however is astoundingly dreary. Any momentary light that shines in their relationship is punished and it's only in the flashbacks to Coleman and Steena, before she dumped him, that we get any reprieve from the constant onslaught of misery.

Director Robert Benton has a knack for capturing older male characters preparing to conquer their old age. It was Benton who directed Paul Newman to his best late years performance in Nobody's Fool. Here he does well by Sir Anthony Hopkins by giving the legendary actor his first romantic lead role. Unfortunately, as great as Mr. Hopkins is, I never believed he and Wentworth Miller were playing the same character. After leaving his job at the college Coleman's connection to his past is left only as an ironic passage in his life. The film shifts it's focus to his relationship with Faunia which has nothing to do with race. It's an entirely different plot.

As for the allusion to the Lewinsky scandal, that was far more the book’s concern than the films. It is referred on more than one occasion and as in the book it is brought up as an example of political correctness run amok. It runs parallel to the ridiculousness of Coleman's own persecution for his racist remark that wasn't racist. Clinton's indiscretion was bad but not impeachable. 

The novel used Coleman and Faunia's many problems to magnify why Clinton-Lewinsky was such a meaningless endeavor, the movie makes the same reference and both seem heavy-handed to those of us who already realize what a bunch of trumped up ridiculousness Clinton-Lewinsky was. Of course issues of race, and death and family are more important than whether or not Bill Clinton got a BJ in the Oval Office. We know that! Thankfully the film doesn't linger on the point.

I would have liked to see more about Coleman growing up. Pretending to be white while coming of age in the 50's and 60’s with the rise of the Civil Rights movement, that has more inherent drama than any semi-controversial small town May-December romance ever could. Someday someone should revisit Roth's novel and extrapolate on the ideas put forth about Coleman's youth. That sounds like a movie I would like to see.

Movie Review The Ice Harvest

The Ice Harvest (2005) 

Directed by Harold Ramis 

Written by Richard Russo, Robert Benton 

Starring John Cusack, Billy Bob Thornton, Connie Nielsen, Randy Quaid, Oliver Platt 

Release Date November 23rd, 2005 

Published November 22nd, 2005 

Director Harold Ramis is best known for lighthearted comedy with an edgy intellect. His best work, 1993's Groundhog's Day, is such a true gem of a film that its polish has only shined brighter in the years subsequent to its release. Most credit for that film goes to Bill Murray's complex curmudgeonly existential performance. But, behind that performance was Ramis' sly, sneaky direction that played games with the audience that many did not discover until years later.

Even in lesser efforts like Analyze This and Analyze That, Ramis has at least delivered moments of pithy intellect and sly commentary. Ramis' latest effort Ice Harvest is nothing like anything he's directed before. A black hearted comic noir so thick with dark irony and detached violence one wonders if a late night cocktail of Pulp Fiction and Fargo somehow festered in Harold Ramis' dreams.

John Cusack stars in Ice Harvest as Charlie Arglist, a low level midwestern mob lawyer whose job seems to be holding down bar stools in mob controlled strip clubs. Charlie had never shown an ounce of ambition until a mobster named Vic (Billy Bob Thornton) convinced him to lift two million dollars in mob money from a local bank.

Getting the money was easy, now Charlie simply has to get out of Wichita. Unfortunately that will have to wait until morning as the entire town is nearly shut down due to an ice storm. Vic also has a few loose ends to tie up before they can go, including his soon to be ex-wife and a mobster, Roy (Mike Starr), who has discovered Vic and Charlie's scam.

Charlie is not simply waiting out the storm either. He is hiding from Roy while being seduced by Renata (Connie Neilsen), the manager of one the many strip clubs Charlie frequents, who is well aware of the money Vic and Charlie stole and has an eye on joining them in their getaway. Before Charlie can close that deal however, there is the matter of his best friend, Pete (Oliver Platt), who has chosen this night to get record-breakingly drunk and only Charlie can help him get home.

Pete happens to be married to Charlie's ex-wife which leads to an awkwardly humorous scene where Pete confronts his wife's growing dissatisfaction with their marriage in the midst of Christmas dinner at her parents house as Charlie stands by saying goodbye to his young daughter and unhappy son who he never sees. Platt is very funny in the scene but his plot really has little or any relation to the rest of the movie.

The rest of the film is full of double and triple crosses, bodies pile up high and all the while director Harold Ramis and writers Richard Russo and Robert Benton can't decide if they are making a dark comedy or a modern noir. Cusack's performance is, for the most part, dark comedy. Charlie assesses every plot development with a cowardly paranoia and suspicion that makes him the butt of every joke and the comic victim of every other character in the film.

In fact most of the cast is playing dark comedy. Thornton plays it cool for the most part but then there is the scene, featured prominently in the films trailer, where he has stuffed Roy in a trunk and comically beats it with a golf club which is straight slapstick. This is followed by a funny exchange in the car on the way to dump the body as Roy, in the box, attempts to save his life by convincing Charlie that Vic is going to kill him too and run off with all the money. The scene is funny but nothing after it is and much of what comes before it is unamusing as well.

As Cusack, Thornton, Platt and Starr are all playing dark comic riffs, Ramis is directing a bleak, mean spirited and violent Coen brothers' style anti-thriller with Neilsen's femme fatale and Randy Quaid's mob boss clearly not in on the rest of the cast's joke. The film shifts uncomfortably from ugly violence to black comedy, never able to incorporate the two in a way that makes both work.

Ice Harvest is shot as confusingly as it is plotted. Certain scenes have the bleak grays and blacks and dark colors of a noir mystery right down the rascotro lighting. Other scenes feature the bright colors and slick styling of any major mainstream comedy. A scene of Charlie standing in the empty frozen tundra of a Kansas highway is straight noir but the scenes between Cusack and Oliver Platt are from a dysfunctional holiday comedy filled with brightly decorated Christmas items. The shooting further muddies the line between the film's noir and dark comic intentions.

John Cusack does find a way to make his hapless loser Charlie work in terms of winning the audience to his side. Even as Charlie engages in some of the bad behavior in the film he retains an air of detached observation. With every dark development Charlie rarely gets riled up, he merely rubs his eyes in frustration and gets down to the distasteful business of surviving this one extraordinarily difficult night.

Oliver Platt's performance is equally as winning as Cusack's. The two actors spark a terrific chemistry in the few scenes they have together. Despite his oafish and even rude actions, Platt's sad sack Pete is very sympathetic in his sad drunken way. Had the film been able to straighten out the problems with its tone Platt and Cusack's performances alone could have made Ice Harvest a worthy effort.

It's not that dark comedy and modern noir are mutually exclusive genres.  It's just a difficult balancing act to make the two elements work together. Fargo, for example, works on both levels because of its exceptional cast and the assured direction of the Coen brothers. Ice Harvest director Harold Ramis is unable to find the balance between the comic performances of his cast and the dark action script.

Ramis wants to escape his reputation as a director of light comedy and indulge his dark side but his comic instincts are uncontrollable and express themselves in the direction of his actors. Ramis clearly wants to indulge his dark side in Ice Harvest but he cannot quiet his crowd pleasing instincts. After years of light, entertaining comedies, Ramis is very in tune to giving the audience the simple pleasures that most seek. Ice Harvest is not a film as a whole that can or should give audiences what they want.

The film's happy ending underscores my point. Watching Charlie escape with the money, and with his pal Pete, I could feel the gears turning as Ramis attempted to please the audience with a pseudo-happy ending. But what did Charlie do to deserve a happy ending? Granted that both Cusack and Platt are very good together and earn our sympathy, their plot is from an entirely different movie. Charlie still did a lot of unforgivable things and punishing him in a darkly ironic way would have been a more appropriate ending.

With a cast this talented Ice Harvest should be far more entertaining than it is. The failure lies with Ramis who, whether unwilling or unable, cannot find a way to mix his comic instincts with this black-hearted script. The result is a mixed bag of darkly humorous moments and awkward modern noir violence. John Cusack delivers a dead-on performance but the film lets him down and more importantly it lets the audience down.