Interview. Robert Benton.

"Forty years after co-writing Bonnie and Clyde, nearly 30 years after winning a fistful of Oscars for writing and directing Kramer vs Kramer, [Robert] Benton, who turns 75 this month, is now an éminence grise, standing a step behind Clint Eastwood as one of our last remaining masters of humanist drama," writes Patrick Goldstein in the Los Angeles Times. "As Hollywood films have grown increasingly noisy and sterile, Benton's have become more resonant and serene. Most of his best work explores common lives and the connections between family and community, be it the small-town clan of Nobody's Fool or his affectionate portrait of life in his hometown of Waxahachie, Texas, that occupies the center of Places in the Heart."

And just up at the main site is Sean Axmaker's talk with Benton about his new film, Feast of Love, about what all he owes Robert Altman and about the ongoing debate over violence in movies.

Updated through 9/28.

"[I]ndeed, there is much love in the [Feast of Love]," writes Matt Singer at IFC News. "Too much, in fact. If this is a feast, it is one in which the host bought an enormous quantity of food, and now the guests feel obliged to stuff their craws until they're nauseous and bloated. This sort of movie and that sort of meal calls for a kind of moderation that director Robert Benton appears unwilling to provide."

"Competent staging and serviceable performances are about the only compliments I can think to pay the film, which charts the romances of some Portland, Oregon simpletons with such laughable pretentiousness that, were it not for everyone involved playing the material for straightforward uplift, it would feel like a parody of Grand Canyon, Playing by Heart, and its faux-profound ilk," writes Nick Schager at Slant.

Updates, 9/25: At indieWIRE, Nick Pinkerton empties both barrels before concluding, "All this rancor towards an undoubtedly well-meaning movie may seem a bit much, but when you live somewhere with one 'art'-house option, and a steamer like this clogs up a precious screen for five weeks, it can really ruin your life."

The Oregonian's Shawn Levy, too, talks with Benton.

"The cast performs as expected," writes David D'Arcy at Screen Daily. "[Margan] Freeman is a stoic sage. [Greg] Kinnear is a bumbling romantic. Jane Alexander has a mature forbearance. Toby Hemingway has the eager radiance of a youth destined for martyrdom. Fred Ward is the odd man out as Oscar's violent alcoholic father Bat. He is a drunk, and hence the nastiest of misfits in this movie about sweet neurotics who do nothing worse than overdose on coffee and then overdose on talking about themselves."

Benton's "decided to serve up a film feast consisting only of sweets: a smorgasbord of cream puffs and treacle tarts, all topped with a bracing smear of marshmallow fluff," writes Julia Wallace in the Voice.

Updates, 9/26: "Mention the name Robert Benton to anyone who has worked with him and then duck while the superlatives fly," writes Sara Vilkomerson, who profiles him for the New York Observer.

Matt Prigge meets Benton for the Philadelphia Weekly.

Everyone may love Benton, but Feast is "offensively silly," declares Cathy Erway in the L Magazine.

"[I]f a lot of the characters in Feast of Love seem a little too good-hearted to be true, Benton and screenwriter Allison Burnett (adapting a novel by Charles Baxter) make sure that enough bad things keep happening to them to keep the film from getting too cloying," writes Paul Matwychuk.

Updates, 9/27: "Feast of Love is a perfectly serviceable romantic drama that slowly builds into something much stranger and even wiser," writes R Emmet Sweeney at the Reeler. Yes, it's "unabashedly sentimental, but also manages to be clear-eyed about the spotty, earth-bound motivations that can drive such sentiment."

"Feast of Love is the Fear Factor of romantic dramedies, forcing audiences to endure one false moment of saccharine sentimentality after another until viewers will find themselves wishing they'd opted to stick their head inside a bucket of scorpions," writes Alonso Duralde for MSNBC.

"Not as incisive or suspenseful as his breakthrough, Kramer vs Kramer, Feast of Love still shows that male directors and writers can get at relationship matters quite well," proposes Marsha McCreadie in the New York Press.

Chuck Wilson talks with Benton for the LA Weekly.

Updates, 9/28: "Remarks about Greek gods and the foibles of humanity may have their place over brandy and cigars," writes Stephen Holden in the New York Times. "But despite the kindly gravity Mr Freeman puts into them, they sound portentous and condescending in the context of Feast of Love, a hollow contrivance masquerading as a wise and witty contemporary gloss on A Midsummer Night's Dream."

"I can't remember when I last saw a movie so maddeningly inconsistent, with incisive observations and credible behavior pressed right up next to material so stupid it practically drools," writes Mike D'Angelo at Nerve.

"[I]n the Arcadian, storybook Portland, Ore, in which the movie is set, love is a simple binary system - it's either on or off, pure or compromised, hot or age-appropriately snuggly," writes Carina Chocano in the Los Angeles Times. "What it's not is complicated, or nuanced, or interesting."

"Maybe Benton's serenely dull time-waster should take a cue from one of its main settings, and become the first Hollywood film released directly to coffee shops," suggests Nathan Rabin at the AV Club.

John Patterson talks with Freeman for the Guardian.

Posted by dwhudson at September 24, 2007 3:33 PM