This film targets African American women and indeed the audience I screened the film with was made up of primarily women. It is a story that they will best relate to. There are several subplots which make up the whole of the film. In one story Whoopi Goldberg plays a religious fanatic who yells, “Repent! Repent!” a lot to her two daughters; the oldest one she is most unhappy with for her habit of sleeping with a different man almost every night. The youngest daughter she has high hopes for until she winds up pregnant and then she gets the same treatment as her older sibling.
In another plot a man is cheating on his wife after taking thousands of dollars from her, money which she had saved from her job and he blows it in a bad investment. In still another story a young woman likes a man and accepts his dinner invitation. She promises to make dinner for him on their next date and he shows up with wine and soon strips down and proceeds to rape her. The scene is fairly graphic, with the man holding her down and forcing himself on her from behind as she cries in her humiliation. In another scene of this endlessly unhappy story a vet who has returned from the war drinks constantly and abuses his wife and two small children, a boy and a girl. Ultimately he carries the abuse to a tragic conclusion.
This film includes some of the stars such as Whoopi Goldberg and Phylicia Rashad quoting poetry about being a colored woman during some of the more intense moments in the film. Women, and the film suggests, particularly black women, have a difficult lot in life. One concern I have is that it portrays most men as pigs. Maybe it is a call for men to be kinder to women, especially the ones they have relationships with.
The bottom line for us at Dove is that the film is not family friendly, not by a long shot. It includes a ton of language including biblical profanity and the dreaded F bomb, in addition to sex between unmarried couples and rear male nudity. It also includes frank sexual comments and innuendos. We therefore are unable to award our Dove Seal to the movie.
