The Feast of Love (2007)

While not as movingly written and acted as Crash or The Notebook, The Feast of Love is set, plausibly at the intersection of Love Actually and Places of the Heart, in a small college community in Oregon where nine lives intersect and overlap in love and loss while wrestling with the what-ifs and consequences of their personal choices. Morgan Freeman is the endearing centerpiece as a college professor on extended personal leave because of a great loss in his life, with Jane Alexander well-cast as his strong and supportive wife. Similar to the sensitive but wronged character he played in As Good As It Gets, Greg Kinnear is the idealistic husband of Selma Blair and later Radha Mitchell, as each flawed woman shows how bad girls don't want nice guys. Alexa Davalos and Toby Hemingway are a charming young couple facing challenges and finding help and support from the community clustered around Freeman and Kinnear. A handful of sex scenes and a handful of nude scenes transport this movie from the emotionally moving and tightly integrated neighborhood of Crash to the episodic red-light district of Closer, but because The Feast of Love runs from good to ever better in its connection to our universal human wants and needs, I ranged from giving it 3.5 stars to 4 stars to, by the end, 4.5 stars.