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So many families have one: the person whose very presence has a way of temporarily ameliorating interpersonal turmoil between members. For the family featured in Soul Food (1997), that person is Big Mama (Irma P. Hall), a matriarch whose adamance about hosting a family dinner every Sunday has done wonders to keep things tight-knit and problems tempered before they can get out of hand.

It isn’t long into Soul Food, which reveals itself a big-emotion family melodrama with a toxic streak, that that sense of harmony is challenged. It comes from a major health scare for the diabetic Big Mama, who, during surgery, has a massive stroke that results in a leg getting amputated and a coma from which there’s no telling when she’ll wake up. Without her to play peacemaker, dynamics between her daughters (Vanessa Williams, Vivica A. Fox, and Nia Long), the men in their lives (Michael Beach, Mekhi Phifer, and Jeffrey D. Sams), and each other start to unravel.

All is narrated by the Fox character’s preternaturally wise young son (Brandon Hammond) — a move that quickly gets grating — and all unsurprisingly leads to the conclusion that blood is thicker than water, and that the family unit ultimately ought to be preserved at all costs. It’s easy to be touched in some way at the visual of a family filling out a dining-room table, any issues between them assuaged by a lovingly cooked meal. But there’s something about Soul Food that can make it hard to stomach what must be overlooked to accept its happy ending.

It’s not hard to pinpoint the something: the film asking us to look at problems it would be reasonable to not see as forgivable — infidelity where the cheating partners are in some way betraying someone else in the family; a burst of domestic violence — as things the women characters affected by them need to “get over” not just to protect the sanctity of the family but also marriage. It’s an insidious feature in a movie that otherwise often works as a solid soap opera. It’s no surprise that, a few years after it came out in theaters, it spawned a TV series that lasted a respectable five seasons. I haven’t seen it, but I’m curious about the extent to which its dramas are undergirded by frustratingly conservative moralization.