fried chicken, catfish, ham hocks, collard greens, black-eyed peas and sweet potato pie.

The tradition began in Mississippi and followed the family north to Chicago.

Mother Joe leads her daughters in preparing the meal and presides with her down-home wisdom and calming influence.

Arguments break out among the headstrong daughters almost like clockwork, but Mother Joe instills peace in time for dessert.

The family dinners are the beginning and ending points for "Soul Food'', a warm, charming celebration of family strength, forgiveness and second helpings.

Adding spice to the meals are the feuding daughters. Teri (Vanessa L.

Williams) is a lawyer who resents always bailing out the family financially without enough gratitude. Maxine (Vivica A. Fox) is a three-time mother who simmers at Teri's superior attitude. Bird (Nia Long) owns a beauty shop and covets the finer things in life.

The glue that holds the family together weakens when Mother Joe (Irma P. Hall) suffers a stroke during an operation and goes into a diabetic coma. The Sunday dinners come to an end, and the daughters' lives slide into melodrama.

Teri's husband, Miles (Michael Beach), also a lawyer, wants to pursue a career in music. That plan alienates the practical Teri, driving Miles into the arms of cousin Faith (Gina Ravera), a dancer.

Bird's new husband, Lem (Mekhi Phifer), is an ex-con whose history makes it hard to get or keep a job. When Bird arranges a job for Lem through an old boyfriend, Lem blows up and is soon in fresh trouble.

Watching all this with wide, absorbent eyes is Teri's son, Ahmad (Brandon Hammond), who feels a special link to Mother Joe and narrates the film.

The motif of the family gathering around the dinner table is a favourite one in films. It has been used in Avalon, Hannah and Her Sisters, Eat Drink Man Woman and Home for the Holidays.

Writer-director George Tillman Jr. makes good use of the device in "Soul Food'' by stressing the sense of ritual that forces warring siblings to set aside their differences at the table. He has a sparkling ensemble cast to bring his characters alive and an appreciation of the role ethnic food plays in a family's history.

He also has a weakness for soap-opera plotting that plays to an audience's expectations. When Faith starts to move toward Miles, the audience gasps knowingly, convinced that Teri will come home at any second. Sure enough, there's the shocked wife, right on cue.

He also succumbs to the temptation to make everything right in the end. Real family dramas play themselves out over years and resolve slowly, if at all. As individuals change, the family dynamic changes, and happy endings don't come knocking on the door like the ending of a Frances Hodgson Burnett novel, but they do in "Soul Food''.

The other problem is Ahmad. The actor does a terrific job, but the boy comes off as too precocious. Children see life almost entirely on their terms, and the dramas of aunts and uncles are as remote as mediaeval mythology. Yet Ahmad is entirely plugged into the needs and weaknesses of all the adults around him with little thought of himself.

Feeling, which is even more important to this movie than food, carries "Soul Food'' with an admirable optimism and another positive portrait of a middle-class black family.

After all, the last time we saw a black family sitting down to dinner in a movie, Eddie Murphy was playing all the roles, and the topic of conversation was bodily functions. -- The Columbus Dispatch "Soul Food'' is showing at the Liberty Theatre this week.

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