Review: Precious

Gabourey Sidibe, Mo’Nique, Paula Patton, Mariah Carey, Lenny Kravitz, Sherri Shepard. Lionsgate presents a film directed by Lee Daniels. Written by Geoffrey Fletcher, based on the novel Push by Sapphire. Running time: 109 minutes. Rated R (for child abuse, including sexual assault, and pervasive language).

Winner of audience prizes at both the Sundance and Toronto film festivals this year, director Lee Daniels’ Precious: Based on the Novel Push by Sapphire, isn’t quite the feel-good uplift picture those awards might suggest. In telling the harrowing story of Claireece Precious Jones (newcomer Gabourey Sidibe), an obese, illiterate sixteen-year-old African-American girl living in a Harlem fleabag with a cruelly abusive mother (Mo’Nique) and pregnant for a second time by her own father, Precious takes us to places we know exist but would rather not see, and where most films don’t have the courage to go. More than any other film of 2009, Precious is a picture has grit and guts, and great acting.

Precious has about as dead end a life as one could imagine. She lives in a dump. Her mother is a rageaholic beast who routinely beats her. She is frequently raped by her father (though not any father in the traditional sense of the word). She is also illiterate, and has no friends as the public school where she is taunted. She steals food from local restaurants in order to eat. She feels that the world views her as “black grease to be wiped away.” But as we will see, she has the sheer force of will inside that large frame to make incremental changes in the bleakest circumstances, which are frequently interrupted by flashy fantasies of stardom and success, transporting her from her personal hell.

Push was the original title for the film, and push Precious does. Unable to keep up in school before an expulsion for pregnancy, she enrolls in Each One Teach One, an alternative education program for misfit teen girls led by compassionate teacher Blu Rain (Paula Patton), a ray of warmth who senses deeper troubles in Precious and does her best to heal them. She begins, in small ways, to help Precious understand human kindness and love, concepts distorted by her mother’s vicious control.

Precious bonds with classmates and longs to reconnect with her Down Syndrome-afflicted daughter, in the custody of her grandmother. But mother Mary is a heinous perversion of maternity seeing her own daughter as household slave, welfare ticket and competition for her man. In a series of confrontations between mother and daughter, director Daniels stages terrifying clashes of emotional and physical violence.

At the welfare office, Precious meets a no-nonsense social worker (Mariah Carey) who immediately sizes up the situation and encourages Precious to share her troubles, which doesn’t happen easily. She understands that to help Precious get on with her life, she must help her confront the root of the problem—her mother. Carey is, in a word, terrific in this tiny role, an example of an actress making something memorable out of something very small. The unrecognizable superstar plays both jaded and compassionate at the same time, and it feels real.

From the producing duo of Oprah and Tyler Perry, one might suspect Precious would be laden with self-help rhetoric or heavy-handed religious conversion. But the film does none of these things. This isn’t a Lifetime movie of the week; far from it. As one of the year’s best films, Precious, like the film’s poster—an abstract painting of its heroine, in unfinished brush strokes—is about a life in progress, simply moving forward if not upward.

Sidibe is a revelation in the title role. Selected from an open casting call, the novice star carries the film with an inquisitive reservation and a face that hides, sometimes through folds of weight both physical and emotional, an indomitable spirit. The actress is rock-solid and convincing not as a victim, but as a growingly confident young woman determined to get beyond the evil hand she was dealt.

Dominating the film is a shocking performance by author/comedian/talk show host Mo’Nique. She can add dramatic actress to that list of accomplishments, and if she doesn’t win the Oscar this year, what good are they? What she does with this character is one of those turns that puts your jaw on the floor—taking her from monstrosity to almost sympathetic —that she walks away with not only the film, but trumps nearly every other screen performance this year.

Consider, for example, the scene where a social services worker visits the family apartment, depicted as a de Sade-esque inferno in a triumph of art direction and cinematography—a dark, grimy chamber of emotional and physical horrors. Literally on a dime, Mo’Nique transforms the character from hateful harridan to warm, welcoming mom—and then right back again, tossing Precious’ daughter aside violently; a discarded prop. She smokes, swears, dances in her underwear, throws televisions down stairs and rails about the hair on her pig’s feet dinner, all with satanic glee. She then delivers a final monologue about the origins of abuse, in a stripped down confessional of such galvanic intensity, that it blows the lid off the film.

Precious is a great and distinctly American movie that generates shock waves of drama and truth, reminding us of what Hollywood used to do well—give us stories about human characters who share, grow and change. Precious is, indeed.

- Lee Shoquist