RECOMMENDED “Is love just nature’s plot to give us lots of screaming babies, or is it the only thing that matters?” Robert Benton, who co-wrote “Bonnie and Clyde” and Richard Donner’s “Supermanm” and has directed movies like “Kramer vs. Kramer,” “Places in the Heart,” “Twilight” and the magnificent “Nobody’s Fool,” turns 75 on Saturday, yet there’s a youthful exuberance and fleshy vitality to his latest, “Feast of Love,” that’s reminiscent of films by much younger directors, like Gabriele Muccino, and his “Last Kiss” (2001). While narrated by one of its central characters, as was Charles Baxter’s novel of the same name, the narrative, relocated to Portland from Ann Arbor, Michigan, stays in the moment. Morgan Freeman’s stalled academic watches the world around him and he’s never disappointed by the potential for love, even when it fails, even when its embers fall and then rise again. The young, the old and the middle-aged: every stage of romantic life is on display under his kindly, appreciative gaze. Then there’s the non-strategic, integral casual nudity. There are a number of directors in their twenties, obviously from an entirely different upbringing (such as Chicago’s Joe Swanberg, whose “Hannah Takes The Stairs” plays Siskel in October) who are as comfortable with depicting the dishabille of domestic life, but to see a film where characters kiss and touch and swoon and moan and fight and cheat and, mostly, hope, in and out of beds and clothing, is really rare in any contemporary American movie with a budget of any scale. Yet, that’s not what’s central in the revolving romances that include coffee-shop owner Greg Kinnear, whose marriage to Selma Blair goes wrong and leads to another marriage, to real estate saleswoman Radha Mitchell, who’s still in thrall to hatefucks with a married man, which leads him finally to what seems like lasting love in what could have been the most pathetic cry for help in his life. Freeman’s character is mourning a loss, yet is comforted by wife Jane Alexander. The younger contingent work at Kinnear’s café, a once-and-former heroin addict played by Toby Hemingway and a forward yet emotionally susceptible girl (Alexa Davalos) with an abusive alcoholic father (Fred Ward). It shouldn’t be this good, it should just be absolute corn, but I loved almost every minute of “Feast of Love,” without even one single use of the word “cornucopia.” (Oops.) Kramer Morgenthau’s cinematography is lush and lovely. 102m. Anamorphic 2.40 widescreen. (Ray Pride)
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