Posted on Thu, Nov. 19, 2009 01:15 PM
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close‘Precious’ is loaded with powerful performances | 3 stars
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Few movies merit the kind of breathless praise that has been heaped upon “Precious: Based on the Novel ‘Push’ by Sapphire.”
It’s a good movie, but it’s not that good.
Lee Daniels’ drama does, however, feature two performances that will kick viewers in the solar plexus. And at key moments, “Precious” exudes an elemental power that transcends its improbable plot and Daniels’ tenuous direction.
Precious (Gabourey Sidibe) is an obese, sullen and silent junior-high student in the Bronx. She lives with her mother, Mary (comic Mo’Nique, fearless in her reprehensibility), an abusive, welfare-soaking couch potato who’s likely to heave a butt-filled glass ashtray at her daughter’s head if dinner arrives late.
Precious has one baby — a girl with Down syndrome being reared by her grandmother — and another on the way. In both cases she was impregnated by her father, who apparently visits the apartment only to rape her.
Geoffrey Fletcher’s screenplay is less about plot than about the evolution of Precious as a character. When we first see her the girl is an amorphous blob, her sunken eyes hidden by the surrounding flesh. She’s largely unresponsive to teachers and classmates, though she harbors dreams of being rich and famous and settling down with her thin white math teacher. These yearnings are depicted in sequences that struck this viewer as clumsy and heavy-handed — or perhaps that’s Daniels’ way of depicting the hackneyed fantasies of a teenage girl.
Over two hours Precious emerges as a person in her own right. Because of her pregnancy she’s pulled from regular classes and sent to a nontraditional school for problem kids. There, the dedicated teacher Ms. Rain (Paula Patton) presides over a classroom of mouthy, stubborn, angry young women. With a regimen of cajoling, demanding and confronting (with a bit of TLC thrown in), Ms. Rain gets them to write about their lives.
So “Precious” is mostly about our heroine coming out of her shell. There are digressions to the hospital where she gives birth (musician Lenny Kravitz plays a nursing assistant who befriends her) and to a welfare office where a caseworker (Mariah Carey) finally gets her to reveal the depths of her abuse. Which brings us to the film’s problematical premise — “Precious” pours so much woe and misery on its heroine that, were it not for the utter sincerity of the performances, you might scoff at its excesses.
Beyond that, one may question just how far Precious comes. True, she begins asserting and expressing herself. Yet as the lights come up she’s still an unemployed single mom with two young children. She’s learned to read and write, but that’s not a lot to put on a job application. And she has health problems that are daunting.
We stick with it because Sidibe, a college student making her film debut, forces us to confront the person inside, the unbowed young woman yearning for acknowledgment. It’s a minimalist performance so delicately etched that when the stoic Precious eventually breaks down, the effect is a devastating tsunami of grief.
Mo’Nique is the film’s other great presence, a wicked fairy tale mother of such unpredictable rage that you’re tempted to assume a fetal curl every time she appears onscreen. Mary’s big scene — where she attempts to justify her abuse of Precious to a social worker — won’t make you hate her any less, but at least it suggests where all that cruelty came from.
In tone, “Precious” falls through the cracks. It’s too quirky and downbeat to qualify as a mainstream movie, though its notoriety is starting to generate mainstream box-office numbers.
Its sensibilities are those of the art house, but Daniels (in his second directing job after producing gigs including “Monster’s Ball”) can’t quite pull off some of the ambitious effects he attempts. One wishes he’d made “Precious” as his fifth or sixth film.
Nevertheless, the movie puts a human face on a character it would be all too easy to overlook. That’s one of the things good art does.
Director: Lee Daniels
Cast: Gabourey Sidibe, Mo’Nique, Paula Patton, Mariah Carey, Lenny Kravitz
Rated: R for language, graphic violence, sexual abuse
Running time: 1:50
Posted on Thu, Nov. 19, 2009 01:15 PM
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