On the Big Board |
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Staff |
In Brief |
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Max Braden |
Freeman's character is the most interesting of the group. |
Noted short story author Charles Baxter’s National Book Award-nominated re-imagining of A Midsummer’s Night Dream is receiving a theatrical adaptation, no small feat for a work of this magnitude. Baxter’s story features, well, Baxter and is set on his street in the town where he actually resides, Ann Arbor, Michigan. Given that the author is not responsible for the screenplay – Allison Burnett, a man by the way, is handling the adaptation – some of the details will be tricky to pull off. We know little about Burnett other than his unfortunate first name and the fact that he is responsible for the abomination that was Autumn in New York, but we are pretty sure about one thing. He probably doesn’t know Charles Baxter or Ann Arbor, Michigan, as well as Baxter does. Having acknowledged that, let’s talk about the positives here.
Much like 2003’s Love Actually as well as 1998’s Playing By Heart (which I still call Dancing about Architecture, because I’m stubborn), Feast of Love is a compendium of love stories that have moments of plotline intersection. The story follows the failed romances of a man named Bradley including two women he has divorced, Diana and Kathryn. Others who have their tales of romance and woe displayed are goth lovers Chloe and Oscar, elderly professor Harry, his wife and their mentally retarded child. The novel is a masterful blending of time wherein the author tells a story that appears to take place in a single night but really occurs over many years. Feast of Love will attempt to duplicate this feat using fractured time storytelling elements.
The cast of The Feast of Love is the movie’s real selling point. Academy Award-winning actor and Electric Company icon Morgan Freeman portrays Harry. Hellboy’s Selma Blair and Pitch Black’s Radha Mitchell portray Kathryn and Diana, the ex-wives of Bradley. That role is played by Academy Award-nominated actor Greg Kinnear. Angel’s Alexa Davalos and The Covenant’s Toby Hemingway portray Chloe and Oscar. The unconventional style of this tale is a concern, but the level of talent involved combined with the pedigree of the novel being adapted is plenty enough to make this an exciting project. (David Mumpower/BOP)
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