"All happy couples are alike. It's the unhappy ones who create the stories"

The Feast of Love: A Novel

Charles Baxter

Today's movie was Feast of Love, a movie based on a book I read a few years ago. I'll be honest. Despite the fact that it didn't receive terribly encouraging reviews at Rotten Tomatoes, it made me cry. It does a good job of portraying just exactly how shallow and irresponsible and dishonest some lovers can be. It does a good job of portraying heartbreak. But the heartbreaks in the movie are too easily healed to be the sort that I have met in my life. One gets the idea that these accidents of love that we get ourselves into can bend and twist the frames of our core selves but ... no one in this movie gets totaled and those characters who are deep enough to get totaled are conveniently left out of the field of vision when they are.

There is a line from the book that did not make its way into the movie that should have:

"When you break the heart of a philosopher,you must apply great force and cunning strategy but when the deed is completed the heart lies in great stony ruin at your feet. If you succeed in breaking it, the job is done once and for all.  It will not be repaired."

Anyway, there were a few other lines from the book that might be worth recording for posterity for those who only see the movie:

"What is agitating about solitude is the inner voice telling you that you should be mated to someone, that solitude is a mistake.  The inner voice doesn't care about who you find.  It just keeps pestering you, tormenting you -- if you happen to be me -- with homecoming queens first, then girls next door, and finally anybody who might be pleased to see you now and then at the dinner table and in bed on occasion.  You look up from reading the newspaper and realized that no one loves you, and no one burns for you.  The workings of nature are mysterious, but they do account for a certain amount of despair among single persons, the irrelevance you sometimes feel." p. 87

About the author of the above quote,, Dianna, the woman that marries him in a spasm of "I think I will play grown up for a while" says:

"As the weeks went on and I grew to know him better, I thought of all these default mode negatives; He was not ignoble, not ill spoken, not a bully, not inconsiderate, not obnoxious, not a boor, not violent ,not distressing, not disdainful, not a bad dresser, not unmindful not dirty, or smelly, and not particularly ironic. He was not unhandsome.  He was not unattractive. In other words, he was husband material simple as that.

 I didn't need a husband, I've said that.  But I hadn't had one, not yet,though there had been halfhearted offers, and I was ready to have the experience, retro as it may have been, of being married, to say nothing of the fact that it seemed about time for one of them, one of these unattached default mode fellows to wander into my life and choose me. . . . f I loved anything about him, it was his plainness, his lack of mask, this failure of costume. . . . e was uninteresting and genuine sweet tempered and dependable, the sort of man who will stabilize your pulse rather than make it race. He proposed.  And I accepted."

Makes me want to take her and drag her behind my chariot around the walls of Troy. What right do people have to play "dress up" with other people's lives, hearts, families?

Question for Comment: One of the main characters in the movie sees a young couple in love and says ".I was envious . . . . and then I felt sorry for them. There's so much they don't know; heartbreak they can't even imagine." He wonders that God ever created such pain as that which can come in the trail of love. "God is either dead, or he despises us." he says, to which Bradley responds,

"God doesn't hate us, Harry. If he did, he wouldn't have made our hearts so brave."

Do you feel like your heart has been made strong enough to heal from the ways it has been broken? Or are there ways in which it will never be repaired?