Review: PRECIOUS: BASED ON THE NOVEL PUSH BY SAPPHIRE

Heart-wrenching and bold, hopeful and difficult, shocking and sweet, PRECIOUS is the kind of film that may be hard for people to watch.  A depiction of the harsh realities that has befallen so many teenagers who have lived and who continue to live in poverty, the film is both a triumph and a tribute to their strength and the strength of those who would reach down from the outside and pull them towards the edge of the cesspool.  It is aided by a fantastic sense of style by director Lee Daniels, an unflinching screenplay by Geoffrey Fletcher (based on the equally unflinching novel PUSH by Sapphire), and a cast that, through and through, is simply flawless.

The title character, played by Gabourey ‘Gabby’ Sidibe, is a 16-year-old junior high student.  Illiterate and overweight, she pushes herself through her day, dealing with the kids who make fun of her on the street and going home to a physically, emotionally, and psychologically abusive mother.  Precious (full name Clareece Precious Jones) is also pregnant with her second child.  Understanding the hardships she must endure outside of the classroom, the principal of Precious’ school enrolls her into the Each One Teach One program.  Hoping to make a better life for herself, Precious goes, and, there, she meets those who would help her do just that.

Sadly, PRECIOUS is the kind of film that not everyone has a desire to sit through.  The pain that this young girl endures through the course of two hours is difficult to watch, and those seeking feature length escapism should look elsewhere.  Precious is beaten, verbally berated nonstop, and even raped by her own father, the source of both of her children.  I did say sadly, though, because there is a light at the end of PRECIOUS’ dark tunnel that is both brilliant and heartening.  Everyone involved in the creation of this film understand its sense of hope and the emotional charge that comes from the moment here and there where we actually see Precious happy.  It’s a jolt seeing this young girl whose life is full of so much pain and endless hate towards her actually smile now and again.  When she breaks down late in the film to her literacy teacher, played wonderfully by Paula Patton, about not feeling love from the world, you understand why, and you weep for her.

Precious is a girl who dream of a better life, who transfers her mind elsewhere when the hardest aspects of her life are trying to interfere.  She dreams of being a movie star.  She dreams of a young boy on a motorcycle coming to pick her up, a character listed as Tom Cruise, though I’m sure there is more to that played out in the novel.  At one moment, a scene of sheer brilliance, she imagines herself and her spiteful mother in the middle of Vittorio De Sica’s 1960 epic war drama, TWO WOMEN.  Never mind that that film is full of hardships for its central characters.  The two women in that film, mother and daughter, love one another deeply.  That, to Precious, is fantasy enough.

These dream sequences are just part of Lee Daniels breathtaking sense of scene crafting.  He captures the late ’80s era the film is set in with glimpses of THE $100,000 PYRAMID and people talking about the bullshit found in a film like BARFLY.  His camera, helped along by cinematographer Andrew Dunn, captures both pain and beauty with equal efficacy and power. Even more than that, Daniels has a way with his actors, pulling the very best from them and making it all seem so effortless.

To begin with, Sidibe is amazing as Precious.  Sidibe has stated that, with her performance in this film, she hopes to bring inspiration, hoping it will help them change their outlook on life or to even help other make the task.  With the performance she gives here, she does absolutely that.  You would never guess this is her first film.  Instead, you would think she was a battered and hurt, young girl who Daniels thrust in front of the camera.  She captures Precious’ pain, but, even more so, she captures her beauty and her hope.

The rest of the cast is equally as moving.  All the girls who play the other girls at Each One Teach One bring  vivacity  and warmth to their characters.  Lenny Kravitz and Mariah Carey show up in near-complete camouflage (actually, their lack of makeup and hair styles would made it a lack of camouflage, but the results are the same).

There is one performance here, however, that goes even beyond that of Sidibe’s.  Mo’Nique, mostly known for ridiculous comedies and flashy cameos in films like DOMINO and BEERFEST (sorry, those are the only two films she appears in that I’ve seen until now), brings out so much vinegar and evil through her character, that you truly begin to hate this woman.  She beats her child, uses her mentally disabled grandchild for her own gain, and sits by while her daughter is raped, and, with that, this character would have been hated enough.  Mo’Nique gives us and understanding of the character, almost forces it upon us with her monologue delivery and insipid rantings towards her daughter.  The character is evil, long since committing acts (some that we don’t even see) that causes irreparable damage to any hope we may have of her turning back.  That is the character on the page.  The performance Mo’Nique gives brings the character to brutal life, and it is, without a doubt, one of the best performances you will see all year.

It is a hard thing recommending a film like PRECIOUS to people, telling them that it is a fabulous film filled with emotionally painful scenes to watch.  It is a harsh reality film, one that depicts life just as it is for so many.  There is pain.  There is adversity.  But, deep down, underneath the most heartbreaking moments, there is hope.  Sapphire captured this feeling in his pages, and everything and everyone involved in PRECIOUS does an equally outstanding job of capturing that on film.