``Chocolat'' is a minor but goodhearted movie, and some people are bound to respond to it as they do to the confection of the title, especially with two matchless actresses -- Juliette Binoche and Judi Dench -- leading an exceedingly classy cast.
Others, though, will be right to question director Lasse Hallstrom's tendency to sugarcoat the darker aspects of a narrative fueled largely by domestic abuse, bigotry and even psychosis.
Like pastry chefs devoted solely to the sweeter things in life, Hallstrom and screenwriter Robert Nelson Jacobs have contrived a happy ending that wasn't in the Joanne Harris novel, while skimping on a depiction of small-town dynamics as disturbing as they are uplifting.
Hallstrom, who was nominated for a best director Oscar for last year's ``The Cider House Rules,'' again is at his best when his story is most benign. Or perhaps the Swedish filmmaker just doesn't have a mean bone in his body.
Harris' novel was an entertaining hymn to liberalism, sensuality and freedom from convention, as refracted through the villagers of a rural French community in thrall of a newly opened chocolaterie.
Vianne Rocher (Binoche) arrives in Lansquenet in 1959 with her young daughter, Anouk, and promptly upsets the tranquility that, we're told in an opening voice-over, long has been the town's byword.
In the novel, Vianne's nemesis was the local priest, a fearsome figure as bent on repression as Vianne -- in her quiet yet determined way -- was devoted to liberation and release.
Jacobs' screenplay also has a priest -- an Elvis-loving newcomer, Pere Henri, delightfully played by Hugh O'Conor. Here, Vianne's greatest opponent is a local count, played by Alfred Molina. You can tell he means trouble from his unctuous mustache
But the count is a largely buffoonish figure, notwithstanding Molina's droll performance.
Even Vianne's eventual love interest, a ponytailed, Irish gypsy named Roux (Johnny Depp) who's new to town, seems a far blander version of the character from the book.
What's left is an outline for real conflict that rarely gets sketched in, as if the screen version of ``Chocolat'' were less a true and wounding parable than a fairy tale with a prepackaged moral: If you bake it, they will come.
Happily, there's nothing remotely simplistic about the emotional charge the outstanding cast generates. Hallstrom's wife, Lena Olin, is radiant as Josephine, a scared woman who is most dramatically ``cured'' by Vianne's chocolaterie. And veteran performers John Wood and Leslie Caron charm as two townspeople who conduct a quietly moving courtship.
Dench showed in ``Shakespeare In Love'' that there are no small roles, just small performers. She is equally magnetic here in the supporting part of Armande Voizin, an ailing grandmother with a quick wit and a kind heart.
``Don't pity me,'' she snaps. She won't let the film sentimentalize her either, although she does have her share of ``live a little'' pronouncements.
Binoche is translucent, and the camera loves her face.
While the film hammers home its points about rebirth, Binoche speaks volumes merely with a blazing smile or a warm embrace. And when she turns on her child in frustration, the performance shows a willingness to avoid the saintly.
She's a complex heroine in a movie that, like the silkiest of frostings, smoothes things out.
``Chocolat,'' a Miramax Films release, is rated PG-13 for a scene of sensuality and some violence. Running time: 118 minutes.
Thanks to Mike Kennedy for sending this Associated Press review which appeared in the New York Times web site on December 14, 2000.