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Features
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Where's the Love ?
Filmmaker Robert Benton warns that by feeding today’s youth a steady diet of mindless entertainment, Hollywood studios are taking the dangerous way out.
Friday, October 5, 2007 at 12:50 PM
By Brent Simon
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Eric Charbonneau/WireImage.com
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Benton with producer Tom Rosenberg
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Robert Benton is no stranger to exploring the inner workings of the human heart. A humanist to his core, it’s the propensity for disappointment and rebound - both forced and embraced - that seems to most fascinate him.
As the co-writer of 1967’s groundbreaking Bonnie & Clyde and the Oscar-honored filmmaker behind the seminal Kramer Vs. Kramer, as well as Billy Bathgate, Nobody’s Fool, 1982’s noirish Still of the Night and the equally tangled films Nadine and Twilight, Benton is an ace chronicler of heartache. To varying degrees, his films often focus on desire, and busted or turbulent relationships; he shines a light on how love is jointly a fuel and an accelerant, driving us ever forward but also making certain inherently sticky situations even more combustible.
His latest film, Feast of Love, is a culmination of sorts of the mining of this theme. Adapted by Allison Burnett from Charles Baxter’s novel of the same name, the Portland-set film is a richly sketched ensemble drama with light grace notes of comedy. Like certain cinema of the 1970’s, it’s a movie that deals in frank terms with adult problems (and sexuality), yet retains a general sheen of positivity entirely of this era.
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Eric Charbonneau/WireImage.com
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Co-stars Greg Kinnear, Morgan Freeman
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Jettisoning the meta-lit conceit of Baxter as a character and omnipotent narrator, the film unfolds to a large degree through the eyes of retired college professor Harry (Morgan Freeman), who watches as love variously mystifies, wounds, devastates and inspires those around him, all while he and his wife (Jane Alexander) cope with the loss of their son. For Chloe (Alexa Davalos) and Oscar (Toby Hemingway), the bloom of young love is lusty and powerful. For coffee shop owner Bradley (Greg Kinnear), his romantic openheartedness seems to habitually land him in bad relationships.
Icy real estate agent Diana (Radha Mitchell), meanwhile, caught up in an affair with a married man (Billy Burke), comes to believe that maybe love is just the absence of disqualifiers, and in its own way that’s perhaps a rare and beautiful thing.
“I’m old enough that I identify with all of them,” says Benton in an in-person chat with FilmStew. “I’m not so old that I can’t remember whatever first love was, and there was a time in my life where I was as hapless as Bradley.”
“One of the things I loved in reading the book is that he just moves from one disaster to another,” he observes. “That was sort of my life. At the age I am now, in October my wife and I will have been married for 43 years, and at this time in life you get to a point where you say, ‘How many good days do I have left? And what a lucky man I am to have this,’ instead of saying, ‘Oh, well what’s my next job going to be or what is this going to be?’ There’s a bittersweet quality to love when you get old.”
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Eric Charbonneau/WireImage.com
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Stana Katic with producer Gary Lucchesi
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Feast of Love captures that, but it also focuses quite specifically on love’s turbulence. Asked if he thinks love is inherently a collision of two personalities trying to determine who will submit to the other, Benton laughs, and pounces with an exclamation. “Yes! I believe that love is one of the most risky things there is, and that movies pretend it’s sweet and loving and joyful, and people running through a field of daisies, which it’s not,” he says. “It’s brutally hard sometimes.”
“One of my favorite love scenes in all of movies is a scene in Howard Hawke’s Rio Bravo,” Benton reveals. “Angie Dickinson, in order to save John Wayne’s life, throws a flowerpot through a window, there’s a gunfight, and he comes in later to thank her. And she’s at the bar, and she has this aria, this beautiful aria, and she’s furious at him. But it’s a love song.”
“And that seems to me the ideal love song — that it contains an enormous amount of conflicting emotion. …Because I think one of the great things about love is that it ends badly — someone dies, or there’s a divorce, but you don’t see people stop doing it. It doesn’t slow anybody down.”
To capture in more realistic tones the full breadth of romance, both blooming and fading, Benton stripped away a lot of the artificialities usually found in Hollywood movies, from coyly placed bedsheets (one vehement argument in the film unfolds entirely in the nude) to swelling strings. While Benton goes out of his way to praise the work of composer Stephen Trask, in a lot of Feast of Love, there is no score at all.
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Eric Charbonneau/WireImage.com
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Co-stars Radha Mitchell, Toby Hemingway
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“We didn’t ever want to underline moments of love,” he explains. “They’re very delicate and fragile and almost unseen, but they’re there. And yet if you point at them, then I think you do them a disservice. I think that the audience is so used to having emotions really shoved in their face, that when you see it and there’s no underscore, or minimal underscore, it allows you to more truly be a part of that scene.”
And yet, as Benton knows, this tack is far from terra firma, commercially speaking. In a case of one predicament feeding the other, layered, multi-story ensemble pieces like Feast of Love are a tough sell both because of their focus on a theme rather than a single, big hook, and the fact the studio marketing departments are out of shape with respect to how to sell such films. If it often feels like studios are simply chasing “short dollars,” in the parlance of rap, rather than cultivating film fans, Benton doesn’t disagree.
“I feel, by and large, that there’s an element in Hollywood studios that is strip-mining the youth of this country, they’re just taking money from it and not giving anything back, not giving it anything but distraction,” he says. “And at some point, I think that if we stop making these kinds of films, films that are risky in different ways, that we do ourselves a terrible disservice.”
“Movies need to, in whatever way, change our ideas about things, or show us that life is not as simple as we thought it was,” Benton maintains. “I’m not so different from anybody. I have to believe that if it interests me, it’s going to interest somebody else, and enough other people that it will make it doable.”
“One of the sad things about movies is that now the business part of movies has gotten more interesting than movies — the cost of movies, that stars get this much, everybody knows what break-even is now, gross and net, all that stuff. We shouldn’t be excited about the business of movies, we should be excited about movies.”
As hard as it might be to envision today, Benton can remember a time in the early 1960’s when, thanks the French New Wave, all anybody talked about in the United States was European films. With a few exceptions such as Arthur Penn, Elia Kazan, Robert Mulligan and John Frankenheimer, the Hollywood movies of that time were seen as relentlessly boring.
“The American pictures were just incredibly bad,” Benton remembers. “But what people were talking about were the new things that we saw in movies. Now I get the feeling that people want to go into movies because they think they can get very rich very quickly.”
| Here, Benton takes a long pause before continuing. “I’ve watched enough people get rich quickly and then pay a price the rest of their lives,” he warns. “I don’t know, I think if you can’t do something that you love, where you feel like you’re a voice - and I don’t think the voice has to shout, it can whisper - doing something that means something to you, even if it doesn’t make a penny, then you shouldn’t be doing this.” | |
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