No director alive can make family melodramas as brilliantly as Douglas Sirk once did, but I'd suggest that Robert Benton comes the closest. Though filmmakers continue to grind out weepies by the truckload, it's extremely difficult to find that exact thread between heavy and hammy, perhaps even more difficult than making a funny comedy. Weepies generally tell depressing stories, about death, disease, failed romances, unrequited romances, estranged romances, etc. The trick is not to make the film itself depressing. Most directors make the mistake of shooting the material head-on, which has the effect of bludgeoning the audience rather than coaxing them in. Part of Sirk's genius was his timing; he made his best films in the 1950s when you couldn't show everything. He used his skills, his palate of colors, space and the elements, to suggest, rather than tell, his stories.

Admittedly, Benton isn't as visually astute as Sirk, but he's a good writer, good with words and characters. He has lots of different kinds of films on his resume -- he's often attracted to crime stories -- but his melodramas almost always hit home: Kramer vs. Kramer (1979), for which he won a Best Director Oscar, Places in the Heart (1984), and Nobody's Fool (1994). Even his previous film, The Human Stain (2003), worked on a basic, emotional level, though critics generally dismissed it because of its failure to live up to Philip Roth's novel and its mismatched casting of Wentworth Miller as a young Anthony Hopkins. Benton's new movie has less of a pristine literary pedigree, and so perhaps it will go down easier.

As Erik reported earlier this month, Morgan Freeman recently signed on to star in Feast of Love, an adaptation of Charles Baxter's well-reviewed novel of the same name. According to this morning's Hollywood Reporter, Freeman has been joined in the cast by Greg Kinnear. Alongside Freeman's philosophy professor, Kinnear will play Bradley Thomas, "an all-around nice guy who owns a coffee shop and paints on the side." Unfortunately for Thomas, like many other cinematic nice guys, he's had some issues with love. Issues like losing one wife to another man, and a second to lesbianism. Doh! Not to worry, though, he's getting back on the horse. Or I assume he is, what with the movie being about "an exploration of the magical, mysterious and sometimes painful incarnations of love" and all.

And about that summary -- it sounds horrible and cloying, doesn't it? The novel, however, sounds complex and witty and actually quite good, so there's a chance that, if the screenplay is somewhat faithful, the movie will be about more than schmaltz. Granted, it's small chance, but still. At least it's there.

Feast of Love starts shooting in August in the capable hands of Robert Benton (who, among other things, directed Kramer vs. Kramer and Nobody's Fool); he'll be working from a screenplay by Allison Burnett, whose stellar writing for Bloodfist III: Forced to Fight surely made her him the obvious choice for a subtle film about love.