'FEAST OF LOVE' REALLY ONLY AS MORGASBORD OF BOREDOM.

Byline: GLENN WHIPP 

>FILM CRITIC

Say you're a well-meaning doofus named Bradley (Greg Kinnear) who owns a coffee house in Portland and wakes up one morning to discover that your perfect wife (Selma Blair) -- a woman you truly love -- has run off with a lesbian softball player.

Would you be put off of love for awhile?

No? OK, but what if the next woman (Radha Mitchell) you meet and impulsively marry brushes you off on your wedding night? Might you then be just a tad cynical?

Not if you're Bradley or anyone else in "Feast of Love," an insufferable examination of the places in the heart that not even Hallmark would touch with a 10-foot pole. In this movie, no matter how despicable the behavior, you forgive because, we are told, "You can't hold someone's love against them."

That little moral nugget can be read as either fantastically naive or positively delusional -- take your pick. Taken with all the other ponderous greeting-card sentiments Morgan Freeman espouses via voice-over in the movie, it can mostly be chalked up to the empty-minded prattling of narcissists trying to justify the unjustifiable.

But let's not get too deep here. "Feast of Love," capably directed by vet Robert Benton ("Kramer vs. Kramer"), has earned a mild buzz as the movie in which everyone (if, by everyone, you mean women) gets naked. And, yes, there is plenty of well-lit, tasteful nudity in the film, which, for a few fleeting moments, manages to distract you from the movie's mind-numbing pretentiousness.

In addition to the romantic misadventures of Bradley, there's a tale of youthful love between pie-eyed dreamer Chloe (Alexa Davalos) and troubled ex-junkie Oscar (Toby Hemingway). Upon meeting, they're immediately labeled a Romeo and Juliet pair.

Nifty bit of foreshadowing, that.

When he's not tossing off lines like, "Sometimes you don't know you've crossed a line until you're on the other side," Freeman plays a college professor who, along with his wife (Jane Alexander), struggles with a heavy loss. Freeman and Alexander manage to puncture the movie's laughable earnestness, but only when they're interacting with each other.

The female nudity supposedly adds a layer of realism and a moment or two of revelation, such as the scene when Mitchell and her lover (Billy Burke) have a post-coital slap-fest and realize they really love each other.

Since the scene's not really there on the page or the performances, you're just left staring at Mitchell in her birthday suit, which isn't such a bad thing. But what's supposed to be a meditation on love plays out as a mere exercise in titillation. And that's not much of a feast. More like an hors d'oeuvre.

Glenn Whipp, [phone]

[e-mail]

FEAST OF LOVE - Two stars

>R: Strong sexual content, nudity, language.

>Starring: Morgan Freeman, Greg Kinnear, Radha Mitchell.

>Director: Robert Benton.

>Running time: 1 hr. 42 min.

>Playing: Area wide.

>In a nutshell: Not much of a feast, barely an hors d'oeuvre.