“The unexpected is always upon us.”

This is certainly true; but Robert Benton’s latest film isn’t trying to illustrate the truism in its most general sense. It mostly makes the case in the context of human relationships—and specifically, in the ways that we “choose” our partners, or the way life choose them for us. So the film takes us on a tour of the ways in which couples meet—and how those happy meetings may constitute disastrous breakups for others. And it shows us how being found must naturally lead to someone being lost. And we can rail about the injustice of it all—or we see a divine hand behind it. In the most noble of examples, we might even see God-like sacrificial purity.

Morgan Freeman plays the central spectator in this cinematic dance of love, loss, and recovery. He’s one of those people who always seems to know what’s going to happen to other people before they do; and yet he doesn’t see how this is also true in his own life. Unexpected blessings cross his path, too—but all he can see is patterns of tragic loss.

“Harry is the wisest person in this film,” says Benton, “and he is told the truth by the most foolish person, and has to learn from it. One of the things that’s in both the book and the screenplay that I like a lot is that this person who you thought was smart isn’t as smart as he thinks he is.”

Now, it would seem that it doesn’t take the smartest cookie in the jar to know that unexpected things are always around the corner. But in real life, it’s pretty much always been the case that the smartest cookies also tend to be the most egocentric. “Harry sees himself as the center of his own destiny by taking the blame [for his own loss],” Benton observes. “And [his wife] keeps saying to him, in a way that’s kinder than the way I’m saying it, ‘It’s not your story. It’s your son’s story.’ Don’t insert yourself into the center of everyone else’s story.”

That’s a fine thing to be telling the character that the director has deliberately put at the center of the screenplay!

But Benton’s adaptation from a novel by Charles Baxter has a few unexpected cinematic tricks of its own up its sleeve. Benton, after all, needs to disarm his audience in order to bring them to a place where they can accept, in a visceral way, the simple maxims that Harry learns. One of the most surprising of Benton’s techniques here, if you’re at all familiar with his films—Places in the Heart, Kramer vs. Kramer, Nobody’s Fool, and others—is the overt sexuality of the film.

In many films, sex scenes are throw-away titillations—not unexpected at all, but almost de rigeur. The composition and cutting of sex scenes even have their own peculiar grammar, a sensual syntax that’s intended to simultaneously build and release tension, and console. We know what to expect at certain junctures in films, and these scenes “deliver the goods,” so to speak, regardless of how explicit or merely suggestive they are.

Benton, who grew up dyslexic, reads grammar in a slightly different way than most folks do, however—and the syntax of the sex scenes in Feast of Love delivers quite a different meaning that one might normally expect. And this, of course, fits into the general plan of the film: Benton uses these scenes not to let us release tension and settle into conventions, but to disorient us a little, to confuse us a little, and, if anything, to heighten the tension. He doesn’t let us off the hook and just slide on into the next plot development. I asked Benton about a couple of those sequences.

The lead-in is a simple romantic interlude between a couple just getting their bearings. Then Benton cuts to a passionate sex scene between a man and a woman, and our expectations come to bear; but then those expectations are upset in almost subconscious ways. What does Benton want us to notice here? “In the scenes of lovemaking, I wanted you to know the intensity and the passion of these people,” he notes. “They weren’t just people who talked about love; there was a physical part of it.” Point made.

And then he moves to the third part of the sequence, and the second surprise. We’re now treated to a post-coital fight in which passion goes out into left field, as described by Benton:

That’s a scene in the book. Line by line, that’s a scene in the book. Nothing is changed. I felt that it was one of the most exciting scenes when I read the book, because it was a scene in which two people have a horrific fight without their clothes on, and we realize that they love each other; and they realize that they love each other, and it’s too late. Now, I’m talking about what Baxter did with what he wrote. The dynamics of the scene that Baxter wrote were so exciting and so unique and so unlike anything that I’d ever read, and so cinematic, that there’s a moment of humor—and it bounces all over the place. It’s like a real fight. You don’t know what’s going to happen next. I think, honestly—and you’d have to talk to Baxter about this—the antecedent of that scene is clearly the fight between Julianne Moore and Matthew Modine in Short Cuts, where she’s ironing the skirt. There’s clearly an enormous debt to that, which we all knew when we were doing it. Hopefully, the nudity in that scene works the same way that it did in the book because it’s startling. It’s just startling.

And startling indeed—but not gratuitously so. The sex scenes aren’t the payoff; what comes later is. And what comes later is a sober meditation not on the passionate thrill of love, but on the downstream cost of that passion—on the very real and equal passion of loss. And it’s all about how one understand God and his purposes with mankind, says Benton:

I will tell you what I believe, in a not very good joke. A very religious man is in Ohio; it’s flooding. And they come and say, “It’s going to flood; you’ve got to leave your house.” And he says, “No, God is going to save me.” And the flood comes, and they send a rowboat. And they say, “Get in the rowboat.” He says, “No, God is going to save me.” The flood comes up and he’s on the roof of the house, and they send a helicopter. And the guy says, “No, God is going to save me.” And he drowns. And he goes to heaven, and [says to God], “I’ve been a good person all my life; I’ve gone to church, and done everything. And you still didn’t save me!” [God] says, “Wait a minute. I sent you a warning, I sent you a rowboat, and I sent you a helicopter.”

All you’ve got is what you’re given, not what you imagine you should be given.

At this point in our talk, I interject that one of the lessons tucked into the film’s meditations about God is that people want to believe—or disbelieve—their own notions of Him, which might be totally off base.

Benton throws his hands excitedly into the air. “He’s not going to be the kind of god that I project onto that screen,” he agrees. “If there is a god, it’s the God that’s there. And that’s what we’ve got to figure out how to live with.”

Courtesy of a local publicist, Greg participated in intimate round-table discussions with Robert Benton in a suite at a downtown Seattle hotel. Also see Greg’s review of Feast of Love.