entertain

I’m not a person who enjoys going out to pay 10 dollars and see a movie very often. Recently though, I decided that I was willing to crack my piggy bank and venture out on the town. It was late at night, and I only had a few options, one of which was a movie titled The Feast of Love. In the theater’s listings, it was billed as a new type of Midsummer Night’s Dream. I was unconvinced, but found myself drawn towards its screen anyway.

Famous actors such as Morgan Freeman and Selma Blair blend smoothly into the cast which also shines with rare gems such as Alexa Davalos. Although obviously a movie about love, it did not fit into the two types of stereotypical love movies. It did not leave me hopeless, nor did it make me feel as though love is a black and white thing that always has a happy ending. On the contrary, The Feast of Love showed its viewers that love is a complicated endeavor.

I left the film quiet and pensive. The plot contains three main couples or people. The first young couple, Chloe and Oscar, fall in love at first sight and match each other ying for yang. It was a love that the viewers fell into and let themselves get wrapped up in. The boy was six months clean from heavy drugs, but as Chloe said, he was “the kind of addict that was a better person for having overcome the addiction than he ever would have been without the drugs and the hardship that came with them.” Their connection was the pure, straight to the heart type, so when their situation started looking up, my heartstrings pulled, and I rooted for them.

Another elderly couple, Esther and Harry, played by Morgan Freeman and Jane Alexander, had the type of relationship to make you coo. They were together for the long haul and seemed to know each other’s quirks inside and out, yet there was an unspoken and recent rift between the two of them.

The last main character was Bradley, played by Greg Kinnear, who was foolhardy in love and fell blindly.

Each situation hit an all-time low during the movie. Bradley fell so blindly that he missed the fact that his wife of six years was a lesbian and that his second wife was in love with another man. We learn that Esther and Harry, the nurturing old couple, never knew their son was a heroin addict, and he died of an overdose right under their eyes. The loving young couple, Oscar and Chloe, buying a cozy house, and they are about to have their first child when Oscar dies of heart failure caused by the very drugs that he had overcome.

Yet, despite these occurrences which break the souls of these inherently good people, each tries bravely to love again. The man finds a new woman who inspires him to love with his eyes wide open, and the elderly couple takes in the pregnant woman as their child, allowing each character to try to experience strong affections again.

Although the movie was not adored by critics, I strongly disagree with them. This film speaks to the amazing strength of the human heart and human-nature. It led me to rethink the matters of love. I believe that hardly anyone has a soul mate. Each of us has so much love inside of us, that giving it to only one person would be selfish. It should be our moral duty to bestow it upon others. What sets us apart from all else is that we not only have the ability to, but the resilient will to put our hearts on the line and, like Chloe, Oscar, Esther, Harry, and Bradley, love and love and love again.