ALL'S IN 'FEAST OF LOVE'S' WAR (Review)
"Feast of Love" chugs along at a leisurely pace as it follows the intersecting lives of a group of laid-back Portland people (Morgan Freeman, Greg Kinnear, Jane Alexander, Selma Blair, Radha Mitchell, Billy Burke, Alexa Davalos and Toby Hemingway) who are looking for love in all the wrong places.
The film's vibe of mild angst rudely implodes when Mitchell, as beautiful but cynical real estate agent Diana, gets into a fight with her married boyfriend, David (Burke). She gets slapped hard and slaps back in a scene in which both actors are stark n*ked. For five highly charged minutes, Mitchell and Burke demonstrate why the film's director, Robert Benton, won an Oscar for filming the seminal 1979 divorce drama "Kramer vs. Kramer."
Dramatizing a lover's quarrel in the n*de was a first for the actress.
"I don't think you can really get comfortable with it. What you can do is have a shot of vodka before you shoot," a ba*e foot Mitchell,
in black jeans and peasant top, says during an interview at a Los Angeles hotel. "It was bizarre because I'm hanging out with Billy at the hotel bar one day, and the next thing you know we're doing this crazy scene."
Nothing like the brittle chain smoker she plays in "Feast," the 33-year-old Australian actress is a yoga-practicing vegetarian who totes around tarot cards when filming. But she does have a clear connection with the emotions running rampant in her character's relationships.
"Diana won't give anything away if he doesn't give anything away," she says. "Their relationship has been very cool, yet there's this compulsive pull that keeps bringing them together. ... When she makes this weird decision to marry this lovely guy who she is absolutely not in love with, that scene is about Diana and her lover trying to process that information."
Mitchell began her career on Australian soap operas, then moved to Los Angeles from Melbourne in 1997, landing her first starring role in 2004 as the title character in Woody Allen's "Melinda and Melinda."
"After Woody saw me in this movie 'Ten Tiny Love Stories,' he called me up on my cell phone and said, 'Do you want to be in the film?' I met him at the costume fitting, and then we started shooting. No rehearsals."
Benton works differently.
"He wants to talk about everything and really gets into it. For a lot of directors, it's about the shots or the look of the movie - performances are almost incidental," Mitchell says. "But Robert is genuinely interested in actors. I think he really loved each of us in this movie and saw us in our best light. It's kind of like your dad's there with you in the sense that you really feel supported."
That support was essential in coaxing unguarded performances from his actors, Benton says by phone. He rehearsed intensively with Mitchell and Burke, deliberately crafting their fight as a high-pitched set piece.
"Both actors understood from the beginning that it was a terrific acting scene that offered them a chance to go places actors don't often get to," he says. "We had to establish from the opening shot that this is unlike any other in the movie. It feels so arresting and real because the sheets are not pulled up around Radha's neck, and from that moment on, these actors just take off like a train going down a track as fast as it can go."
Inspired by Robert Altman's multistrand ensemble pieces, Benton picked his cast with care, building the ensemble around Freeman.
"He's a heavyweight, and I needed to cast other actors in his weight class," he says, "or else you're asking him to drive with the brakes on."
Benton picked Mitchell to play the film's least sympathetic character after seeing her as the high-strung mother in "Man on Fire."
"Radha has a bit of that Grace Kelly coolness to her, a reserve that nobody can get past," he says. "You never see her straining for an emotion. I love all my actors, but she's really the high-wire act in this movie because Diana ... does terrible things. This woman marries the wrong man and breaks up this married man's family. You don't have to think there's something noble about what she does. You just have to like her."
Mitchell recently watched "Kramer vs. Kramer," Benton's case study in compellingly flawed characters, and came away impressed with its modern take on domestic dysfunction.
"It's a classic that really holds up," she says. "The camera glides through scenes and doesn't belabor sentimental moments, yet it isn't afraid to have them. I think that's what Robert is doing again in this film."
In Mitchell's view, "Feast of Love" reflects the messy maneuverings of people seeking a deep connection in their relationships.
"Life is complex. It is complicated. It is not always going to present comfortable situations," she says. "In this film, we take ourselves so seriously that our problems become all-consuming and very confusing, and it creates this bleak demeanor. But from the perspective of Morgan Freeman's character, who's been through his 40s and 50s and 60s, it seems almost ridiculous to get so hung up and frenzied."
