GETTING DOWN TO FAMILY MATTERS

By RICHARD CORLISS

Once is a fluke, twice a hope, three times a trend. So, with the pretty box-office numbers for Soul Food following the $70 million that Waiting to Exhale earned in early '96, and with the highly touted Eve's Bayou opening in two weeks, maybe Hollywood will stop being surprised every time the black middle class goes to see itself on screen.

Quality is another, nearly irrelevant matter; no film has to be well made to be well liked. Indeed, one reason for the popularity of Soul Food is that it pushes emotional buttons with all the subtlety of a poke in the baby-back ribs. It could be a distillation of some unaired black soap opera, so predictable are the plot contrivances--adultery, pregnancy, illness, missing money--and so cartoonishly are the characters drawn. Mother Joe (Irma P. Hall) is warm, loving, doomed. One daughter, Maxine (Vivica A. Fox), is heart-smart and, since she's a mother, a font of family wisdom. Another, Teri (Vanessa L. Williams), a successful lawyer who has subsidized most of the family's extravagances, is, of course, the villain of the piece. Poor Williams: her pretty mouth is forever prissed in disapproval at her more sympathetic sibs.

At the movie's center is a wise child: Ahmad, 10, brings the warring family together. As Ahmad, Brandon Hammond is superb: his serious eyes are alert, his bearing natural. He points the film up the road it should have taken. Didn't, though. The dialogue plays like song cues without the songs, and the rest of a talented cast is wasted. Soul Food aims to be a banquet of feelings, but mostly it serves up tripe.

An attractive, adulterous man; a woman trying to preserve her family; a child who sees and remembers too much. The same elements presented so coarsely in Soul Food come piercingly alive in Eve's Bayou. From the opening voice-over--"The summer I killed my father, I was 10 years old"--the film weaves a spell of magnolia and menace. This 10-year-old is Eve (Jurnee Smollett), second daughter of Dr. Louis Batiste (Samuel L. Jackson) and his elegant wife Roz (Lynn Whitfield). Louis pushes charm as much as pills, and the local ladies swoon at his touch. "To a certain type of woman," he notes, "I am a hero. I need to be a hero." Eve and her sister Cisely (Meagan Good), 14, need him to be one too, and when he proves a sinner, they are devastated. His crime may have been that he didn't dance with Eve or that he danced too close to Cisely. But since Aunt Mozelle (Debbi Morgan) tells fortunes, and lives out bad ones, Eve is a voodoo priestess once removed. Her curse on her daddy could be fatal.

In rural Louisiana in the '60s, and in the humid swamps of the Southern Gothic imagination, tenderness and terror are first cousins destined to marry. With scary assurance, novice writer-director Kasi Lemmons invades Faulkner-McCullers territory and makes it her own. There are a few visual and character cliches, and we wish that, just once in movies, a fortune teller's dire prophecy would not automatically come true. But the folks here believe in its power, and they compel the viewer to abandon skepticism, to hide with Eve in the Batiste closet, where skeletons whisper vengeance.

Jackson wears Louis' shroud suavely; he can seduce everyone except Eve. But this is a woman's film, and a showcase for superb actresses. Morgan does especially fine work as a sorceress whose gift runs away with her. The poise and passion in Eve's Bayou leave one grateful, exhausted and nourished. For the restless spirit, here is true soul food.

--By Richard Corliss