YMMV / Soul Food

• Funny Moments: Uncle Pete rejecting Bird's food.
  • Also, in a flashback, Kenny watching as Maxine and Terri fight upon Teri's discovery that her own sister's been seeing Kenny. The funniest part is Kenny doesn't even stop the fight! He just laughs and weakly asks for them to cut it out!
• Heartwarming Moments: Bird thanking Maxine for always being there for her when she admits that she's pregnant.
• Jerkass Woobie:
  • Teri. Maxine steals Kenny in a flashback. She ends up marrying him and having three kids. Then Miles cheats on her with Faith, another of her own family during their marital issues. This is her second failed marriage. Add this to having to deal with Big Mama's death and you could totally understand her bitchiness.
  • Additionally, everyone criticizes her for being career focused. Note how Big Mama completely dismisses her law degree and the fact that she made partner in her firm—an incredible accomplishment—only seeing the fact that she's on her second marriage, in stark contrast to Maxine, a Happily Married housewife and mother of three. Yet they all clearly enjoy the perks of said career, expecting her to pay for everything—Bird's wedding, Bird's business, Big Mama's hospital bills—to the point where they don't even bother to formally ask her.
• Tear Jerker: A few. All of the scenes with Ahmad in the hospital talking to a comatose Big Mama qualify. Also, the funeral. It's very clear the family will never be the same.
• Unintentionally Sympathetic: The film tries to really lay it on thick that Teri being a lawyer is supposedly inferior and selfish to Maxine's homemaker and even implies that Miles cheating on her with Faith is also deserved due to her apparent coldness and unwillingness to start a family. However, the family comes off as very ungrateful due to enjoying the fruits of the money that her successful career brings to their own lives without bothering to thank her for it or even appreciating her skill or the years of hard work she put into her job. With everything she's dealt with up until now, you can understand her demeanor.
  • Miles can be seen as this too. Even though he cheated on Teri, which was wrong but at the same time?? Both of them was drifting apart day by day and he felt that she wasn’t being supportive enough with his dreams and his passions and that she too was work obsessed. You can’t help but feel a little bad for him is he truly did love Teri but they had come apart.
• The Woobie:
  • The entire Joseph family can qualify, but Mama Joe had it pretty bad; learning her diabetes, namely in not taking care of it, resulting in her leg being amputated, which causes a stroke that puts her in a coma and eventually kills her.
  • Bird as well; she marries a man that the rest of the family sees as bad news who can't get a job due to his criminal record. Upon learning that she had dinner with an ex to get him a job, he gets mad at her and breaks up with her and due to a misunderstanding, he ends up being sent back to jail. After all this, she then learns that she's pregnant.
  • Lem has it pretty rough too. He gets the suspicious treatment from the family because of his criminal past and tries to prove that he’s not that guy anymore by living the straight path and but due to his criminal past he gets fired from his job and tries to find another job so that he won’t be seen as a mooched and gets turned down. When he finally does have some success in getter by another job, Bird’s ex Sim gloats at him about how him and Bird used to fuck and implicates that they still are, which leads to Lem kicking his ass and getting fired from his job. After a unpleasant confrontation with Bird in which her friends think that he beat Bird, Teri calls up one of their in and out of jail cousins to deal with Lem and it ends up him getting arrested again for parole violation.
  • Ahmad, as he gets exposed to a lot of stress and heartache for his young age.

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