Feast of love

WE already know from Gus Van Sant's movies that the young people of Portland, Oregon have particularly complicated sex lives. If Feast of Love is to be taken seriously, which is difficult, the city's older generations have equally messy relationships.

Borrowing from a staple of TV soaps and sitcoms, the film has its characters gravitating around a coffee shop. This one is called Jitters and the owner is Bradley, played by Greg Kinnear with a trademark hangdog expression. Bradley's best customer is Harry (Morgan Freeman), a college professor who's on leave of absence while he and his wife (Jane Alexander) grieve after the death of their grown-up son.

Harry is the only one to notice when a lesbian comes on to Bradley's wife (Selma Blair) and steals her from under his nose. Then again, Harry is so wise and observant, always poised to dispense pearls of philosophical advice, that we are reminded that Freeman has already played God twice. Some of his lines seem to have been taken from a platitudinous self-help book, as when he declares: "Sometimes you don't know you've crossed the line until you're already on the other side."

There's lots more mumbo jumbo when young Chloe (Alexa Davalos) applies for a job at Jitters because of its "harmonic convergence". She promptly falls in love with sensitive assistant Oscar (Toby Hemingway), whose fathe (Fred Ward) is a knife-wielding alcoholic.

This manipulative melodrama would have passed for a TV movie were it not for its superior production values and frequent nudity. It's just the 11th film in the 35-year career of Robert Benton, the Oscar-winning director of Kramer vs Kramer, and only marginally more tolerable than director Robert Benton's previous movie, The Human Stain.