Feast of Love

A film set in Portland. Several stories run around a coffee shop. Bradley runs the place. Well-meaning, talkative and hopeless at reading people; his wife leaves him and it comes to him entirely without warning. Two young people work at the shop. Chloe and Oscar find each other; both come from difficult families and try to build a life together. Harry across the street is a retired professor. He and his wife carry a loss and nobody opens the subject. He watches the others from a distance and gives advice now and then. From there the film shows the same matter at different ages: how love starts, why it ends, and how a person tries a second time. What the narrative is interested in is not romance but luck: all the characters are trying to do the right thing and the outcome often has nothing to do with that. The best section is Harry's; quiet, spare with words, and carrying the whole weight of the film. The source is a novel by Charles Baxter. Morgan Freeman plays Harry and Greg Kinnear plays Bradley. Radha Mitchell, Jane Alexander, Selma Blair and Alexa Davalos are in the cast. Robert Benton directed. Who it is for: anyone who likes intersecting stories and quiet relationship drama. Who it is not for: anyone looking for sharpness; the film touches a great many subjects and presses on none of them enough.