"Soul Food" A Film Review by Linda Lopez McAlister on "The Women's Show" WMNF-FM 88.5, Tampa, FL October 18, 1997 I'm a little bit slow in getting around to reviewing "Soul Food" on the air due to marathon two weeks ago and my travel schedule last week, but it's still playing around town so I thought a review might still be helpful. As you may know this is a film by African American filmmaker George Tillman, Jr. that focuses on a middle class Black family in Chicago rather than on crime, drugs, and violence in the in the streets. To the extent that it gives a more faceted and well rounded view of Black Americans, that's all to the good. And I have to say the film was entertaining and enjoyable with some good, if not terribly nuanced, performances from Vanessa Williams, Vivica Fox, Nia Long playing three sisters and young Brandon Hammond playing the young boy through whose eyes the story is told. But on our way out of the theater my companion opined that it was better than "Waiting to Exhale." While I can see what I think she meant--it was more rooted and down to earth, not as much Hollywood glitz--I found myself having to disagree--at least from my vantage point as commentator on Women and Film. While I don't consider Terry McMillan, the author of "Waiting to Exhale" the greatest feminist in the world, nonetheless, her film was a major bonding experience for the black women in the audience, at least when I saw it. With the males in the audience a tiny majority, the South Philly African American women in that audience were extremely vocal and wholly uninhibited in their response to the film and they really understood what was happening to the women in the film becuase they'd been there. It was a film by a Black woman for Black women and it found its target audience. "Soul Food," on the other hand, while it's being marketed as being about Black women and its female actors are by far the best known members of the cast and the three sisters would seem to be the focal point, that's misleading. The film is made by a Black man, told from the point of view of a black boy concerned with how he becomes a man, and if there's any message that comes out loud and clear here it's a warning to Black women about how they should treat their men. In particular the message, pounded home in a variety of ways in the film, is that a Black woman shouldn't be more ambitious than her man, shouldn't make more money than her man, shouldn't do anything that might put her interests ahead of his. The audience when I saw this film was a mixed one composed mostly of presumably heterosexual couples (and the large extended family doesn't have anything but heterosexuals in it) and there was little audience response, certainly not a trace of female bonding either in the film or among its viewers. Despite a tiny nod toward reconcilliation at the end of the film, much of the time the three sisters are at odds with one another, and the most successful and ambitious of them, a lawyer played by Williams, is plainly the villian of the piece for being excessively proud of what she has accomoplished, and she's duly punished before the end by her less career oriented husband's attraction and dalliance with one of her cousins, which then reduces her to inconsolable victim. And yet we never get any real sense of who this woman really is, what accounts for her drivenness and competetiveness; we only get the idea that either of her sisters' choices might be better--housewife or beauty shop owner--as long as they remember to do nothing even to hint that their husbands might need help in playing the male role of family breadwinner. On the whole, I think that feminists might want to give this one a pass and hope that other films dealing with the Black middle class come along that are more willing to urge a sense of gender equality than this one is and more willing to refrain from preaching a return to old fashioned patriarchial family values than this one is. For the WMNF Women's Show, this is Linda Lopez McAlister on Women and Film. Copyright 1997. All rights reserved. Please do not copy or reproduce this review without permission of the author: mcaliste@chuma.cas.usf.edu. Linda Lopez McAlister, Chair||HMS 413 Department of Women's Studies||University of South Florida mcaliste@chuma.cas.usf.edu||Tampa, FL 33620 813-974-0982||||FAX: 813-974-0336 http://www.cas.usf.edu/womens_studies/mcalister.html