"Food, Family & Love"
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What You Need To Know:
Soul Food is distinguished by good acting, a good screenplay and good directing. This movie uplifts the importance of family, although it is marred by crude language, and depicted sex. SOUL FOOD yet manages to serve up a visual banquet even with banter, bickering and blunt honesty of family gatherings. Strong allusions to Jesus Christ in the visiting pastor’s prayer before the meals enhance the Christian aroma of this film.
Content:
(B, CC, LL, V, N, SSS, M) Moral worldview with outstanding Christian elements of kindly African-American matriarch who presides over dinners attended by quarreling daughters & their husbands; 18 obscenities, 6 profanities & 4 vulgarities; man threatens man with gun, woman threatens man with kitchen knife; upper front & lower rear male nudity; depicted, but not graphic intercourse between married couple & depicted fornication between a man & his mistress; and, miscellaneous immorality
More Detail:
SOUL FOOD emphasizes the soul. Matriarch Mother Joe, (Irma P. Hall) has run a tight family ship in her Chicago house. Mama Joe believed that calling together the members of her fractious family each week for a Sunday afternoon banquet builds family cohesiveness. So for the past forty years, she has invited her three quarrelsome daughters, Teri (Vanessa Williams), Maxine (Vivica Fox) and Bird (Nia Long) and their husbands to help her prepare the sumptuous meals of fried chicken, sweet cornbread, smoked ham, greens, and peach cobbler. The Sunday banquets have brought family closer together.
“Soul food cooking is about cooking from the heart,” says Mama Joe, who intervenes during Bird’s wedding to Lem (Mekhi Phifer) in the movie’s first sequence to dispel Bird’s anger over Lem’s gawking at stripper Faith’s lewd bumping and grinding gestures on the dance floor during the reception. After crying out in righteous indignation in the women’s room at the sight of Lem contemplating Faith’s sexual gestures, Bird strides out, ready to confront the offending woman, but instead sees her newlywed husband dancing with Mama Joe. Bird melts with delighted relief, and joins her husband dancing. Mama Joe has saved her family from yet another potential catastrophe. Mama Joe mentors and confides in her grandson, Ahmad, the secrets of family strength.
Regrettably, her health gives out. Succumbing to diabetes, she initially refuses to let the doctor amputate her leg, then begrudgingly accedes to the inevitable operation, which engenders unexpected complications. She lapses into a coma.
Meanwhile, Mama Joe’s eldest daughter, Teri, a lawyer, fights with her attorney husband, Miles (Michael Beach), about his desire to form a soul music band. Maxine and Kenny (Jeffrey D. Sams) maintain a harmonious marriage, but youngest daughter, Bird, encounters troubles when her earnest, but emotionally volatile ex-con husband, Lem, can’t hold a steady job. On top of these conflicts, Faith the former Stripper, comes back home from Las Vegas to live with Teri and Miles. The threads of the family’s quilt threaten to unravel.
At the Sunday banquet without Mama Joe, a blowup occurs. Teri and Bird accuse each other of wronging the other one, and they stop talking to one another. Lem gets arrested, and goes back to prison. Faith inveigles Miles into a sexual dalliance which his wife Teri happens to witness. Things careen toward crisis. Before she dies, Mama Joe wakes momentarily from her coma and tells Ahmad she wants him to do something for her. What can 10-year-old Ahmad possibly do to bring peace to these quarreling uncles and aunts? The movie concludes with a surprisingly creative and emotionally satisfying ending.
“During time of slavery, us Black folks didn’t have a lot to celebrate, so cooking soul food was the only way we could come together to celebrate the joys and the sorrows of family,” said Mama Joe in voice-over as the credits role. With some crude language, and sexual scenes, SOUL FOOD yet manages to serve up a delicious visual banquet which uplifts the importance of family togetherness even with banter, bickering and blunt honesty of American family gatehrings. Strong allusions to Jesus Christ in the visiting pastor’s prayer before the meals enhance the Christian aroma of this film.
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