Michael Butler’s Blog

A gentle reminder that Feast of Love is opening this weekend around the country. It stars Morgan Freeman and Greg Kinnear. I adapted it from a novel of the same title that was a finalist for the National Book Award.  I hope you’ll get a chance to see it the first weekend.  While being sold as a feel-good movie, it is actually full of dark edges. Here is the end of a review from Film Comment International:

But, even with all this Weltschmerz and tragedy—and there’s a heavy dose of the latter near the end—Feast of Love is not a downer. There are plenty of breezy one-liners, many of them delivered by the incomparably clueless Kinnear. And Freeman once again displays his masterly grasp of the full range of human emotions—all the shadings from dark to light and back again. Speaking of masters, Robert Benton is surely one of the few directors alive who can get today’s movie audiences to dine on a seriously intelligent movie that is served up with large helpings of unabashed, un-cynical sentimentality. There’s not even a pinch of cynicism in Feast of Love, making this one of those rare cinematic treats that, for most of us, will go down easily and leave us with a sweet, mellow aftertaste.