Precious
Directed by Lee Daniels
Precious is a waking nightmare of a movie, a well-wrought tale of monstrousness so extreme that watching it is like watching a car wreck as it happens–you can’t look away even though you know you should because (a) there is nothing of value in the act of witnessing and (b) it says something disturbing about you that you can’t help but want to see the worst as the worst is unfolding.
Precious is being sold as an affirmation-of-the-human-spirit story, with Oprah Winfrey leading the way as the movie’s “presenter.” Certainly, the movie’s nominally positive message about supposedly overcoming adversity is the reason it has become a box-office sensation. This is the result of an implicit deal between the audience and the filmmakers. By turning around and pretending it’s something it really isn’t, the makers of Precious are offering their audience the thrill of soft-core torture porn with a culturally palatable gloss.
The title character is Claireece Jones, an illiterate 16-year-old girl living in Harlem in 1987. She is grotesquely obese and nearly mute; when she speaks, she barely seems to have the energy to open her mouth, and her eyelids are so heavy with despair they appear mostly closed. Her life is one unimaginably terrible thing after another. She is beaten daily by her mother Mary, who also is determined to stuff her full of food to make her as fat as possible.
Mary hates Precious because she believes Precious stole her man. As the movie begins, Precious is pregnant for the second time. In both cases, the father is her own father, who began abusing her at the age of three. The first pregnancy led to the birth of a Down syndrome child her cruel mother–who kicked her in the head while she gave birth on the kitchen floor–insists on calling “an animal” and has shunted off on Precious’s weak-willed grandmother.
Gabourey Sidibe, who has never acted before, gives one of those astounding one-off performances that pop up in the cinema every decade or so: nonprofessional work so natural and unaffected that it makes all other acting seem fraudulent. It’s reminiscent of Harold Russell’s indelible work as the disabled World War II veteran in The Best Years of Our Lives, the incredible charm of Jocelyne La Garde’s turn as a lusty island princess in Hawaii, and the Italian workingman Lamberto Maggiorani breaking your heart as the title character in The Bicycle Thief.
Precious is so beaten down by life that she barely seems to have a pulse; she stands in sharp contrast to Mary, who bids fair to be the most horrible character in the history of cinema. I’m not exaggerating. Played with unforgettably devilish ferocity by the comedienne Mo’Nique, Mary does not have a single redeeming quality. Cruel, belittling, homicidal, hateful, lazy, stupid, a welfare cheat, obsequious to figures of authority and remorselessly vicious to anyone she can dominate, Mary redefines the screen villain.
The brilliant casting of Sidibe and Mo’Nique is a tribute to the eye of the director, Lee Daniels, who seems to be uniquely inspired in this realm. He convinced the pop singer Mariah Carey to take a small role as an exhausted Jewish social-services worker named Mrs. Weiss, and Carey–heretofore only notorious on celluloid for her ghastly performance in a movie called Glitter–is immensely moving and believable.
Precious gets away from her mother as a result of the intervention of Mrs. Weiss and another one of those too-wonderful-to-be-true characters, a drop-dead-gorgeous upper-middle-class black remedial reading teacher (Paula Patton) who also happens to be in a loving same-sex relationship. But don’t worry; just when you thought things were looking up for Precious, there is more bad news to come. That bad news, too, we are assured by the movie’s profoundly false concluding moments, is just another burden Precious can and will overcome.
The movie to which it has been and will continue to be compared is Slumdog Millionaire, last year’s stunning Oscar winner, in which a desperately poor Mumbai orphan relives his own horrifying life story and is rewarded with a deliriously happy ending. But the two films could not be more different. Slumdog Millionaire is a fable of a kind, a story about providence and predestination, filmed in highly realistic settings but told in a stylized manner. In Precious, the title character escapes from her intolerable circumstances by plunging into wild fantasy, but those dreams only serve to make the actual circumstances of her hardscrabble existence all the more acutely depressing.
Moreover, Slumdog Millionaire is a universal story about a boy in love who does everything to be reunited with his beloved. The story told in Precious (which is adapted from an unreadable novel by a pseudo-poet who goes by the name Sapphire) is so extreme that it does not, thank God, have universal resonance. We aren’t all Precious, not even a little bit. In fact, the overwhelming emotion generated by the movie is to make one feel profoundly grateful one isn’t anything like her. It’s an undeniably powerful thing, this movie Lee Daniels has made, but in the end, Precious is little more than a freak show.
John Podhoretz, editor of Commentary, is THE WEEKLY STANDARD‘s movie critic.
