Soul Food

Soul Food is a skilfully concocted piece of melodrama and a welcome serving of wholesome, positively structured film making.

This family has been moulded, controlled and fattened by Big Mama, played touchingly and with great humour by Irma P. Hall. Her four daughters Teri (Vanessa L. Williams), Maxine (Vivica A. Fox), Faith (Gina Ravera) and Bird played by Nia Long have some juicy skeletons in the closet, and their men as you can imagine have plenty to contend with dealing with the pressures of work and with their relationships within such a large family.

One of the men is torn between the legal profession and being a musician, another is doing his best to stay out of jail and get a job, and another of the men in years gone by was the object of desire for two of the sisters.

Soul Food is related to a large extent by Ahmed, the young son of one of the sisters.

Using a child to tell these sorts of stories is a common and usually effective ploy in melodramas like Soul Food. The innocence and truthfulness of children is a wonderfully adept carving knife for slicing through the rubbish we adults present to ourselves as unsolvable dilemmas.

Soul Food has a complicated set of relationships to deal with, a mix that would become at best confusing if handled clumsily, but writer and director George Tillman Jr. has arranged this menu with great flare.

Soul Food lifts itself above the ranks of less entertaining movies in its last reel which, in spite of a slightly implausible ending, is involving and satisfying.

There's a fairly racy scene involving the sexual act which has unfortunately given Soul Food an R rating (if they had just bloodily beheaded one another the rating would have been M 15+, ratings are stupid aren't they!).

Some of the dialogue is hard for this honky to hear or understand but there's also a dance scene in Soul Food for which Breakdance would have broken a leg. There's also some pretty cool soul music.