Robert Benton, Feasting on 'Love'

What Robert Benton talks about when he talks about love is its power and mystery. The way life is grounded by the search for it. The way it can slip from even the strongest grip. The way it never gets old or feels banal.

The director is obsessed, enchanted and bewildered. Perhaps everyone is. But Benton has built a career out of his intense fascination with the topic.

His most noteworthy films of the past three decades -- 1979's "Kramer vs. Kramer," 1984's "Places in the Heart" and 1994's "Nobody's Fool" -- present familiar characters, ordinary lives and the full range of love's twisted complexities.

His latest movie, "Feast of Love," has a good half-dozen pairings that give the three-time Academy Award winner plenty of room for exploration.

"I thought, in a world where people are making movies about romance, this is a movie about love. And that's very different," he says. "Romance is goal-oriented. Love is a mystery."

Based on the 2000 book by Charles Baxter, "Feast of Love" follows several characters, including those played by Morgan Freeman, Jane Alexander and Greg Kinnear, as they grapple with the heartbreaks and infatuations of their own lives -- some with far more grace than others. (See review on Page 38.)

"They were so human, they were irresistible to me," Benton says. The 74-year-old Texas native, who got his start in the business as co-writer of 1967's "Bonnie and Clyde," inquired about movie rights after reading the book when it was released but was told it had been optioned by a studio and assigned to a different director.

Several years later, a screenplay was written and some parts had been cast, but there were scheduling problems with the director, so Benton got his crack at the project.

Chief among those already cast was Freeman, in the central role of a long-married university professor on extended work leave as he grieves for an only child who died.

"The problem with having Morgan is that he's a heavyweight -- and you can't have a heavyweight in a scene with a middleweight," Benton says. Hence Alexander as Freeman's wife and Kinnear in the role of a quixotic friend and coffee shop owner who jumps into a relationship with an unfaithful beauty (Radha Mitchell) after his wife (Selma Blair) leaves him for another woman.

There's a messiness to each relationship, but it's those layers of imperfection that drew Benton to the story.

"I love watching that. I'm terribly voyeuristic, and I love watching people's behavior," the director says, rocking slightly in a chair in his Georgetown hotel room. For the unflinching look at infidelity, he credits Baxter, who conjured fallible characters without passing moral judgment on them.

Benton, incidentally, has been married to the same woman for 43 years. And that love fascinates him as much as any other.

"It hangs by a thread every day," Benton says, eyes twinkling against a ray of midmorning sun. And then he smiles, as if to make clear that's a good thing -- wonderful, even.