Sue Monk Kidd’s bestseller about a young white girl who accidentally kills her mother and leaves her harsh father to live with a kindly family of African-American women was almost certainly less ponderous than Gina Prince-Bythewood’s film adaptation.

Set in the South of the Sixties, where any white girl’s association with a black family did more than raise eyebrows, it is a movie which means to be tough and uncompromising but is simply not sharp enough. In the end, you can’t believe in any of its characters.

Dakota Fanning plays the girl and the main theme concerns her need to be loved. Specifically, she needs to know whether her mother, who had left her father, was returning home to fetch her or simply to get the possessions she had left behind.

Among the African-American cast is Queen Latifah, who keeps bees, and is the obvious Queen Bee of the African-American family, music star Alicia Keys as her sister and British actress Sophie Okonedo as the housekeeper who accompanied the girl when she left home. Paul Bettany, another Brit, plays the girl’s pathological father. The casting is fine, but the film’s strange and potentially heartening story desperately needs a bolder touch.