Precious

When I went into the theatre this weekend to see Precious, I was expecting a real hair shirt experience like Mel Gibson's Catholic torture fest but set in the inner city. Instead the film turned out to be something different and much more complicated than my review reading had led me to believe.

The titular character, played by Gabourey Sidibe, is a teenage girl living in Harlem in 1987. Overweight and illiterate, sitting quietly in the back of class in school provides respite from the abuse she suffers at home from her mother, Mary, who resents and insults her without mercy. Precious' father proved to have incestuous inclinations and we find the girl pregnant for the second time by him. At school, she daydreams about her math teacher as well as being a movie star and model.

Precious is expelled from school for having become pregnant again but the earnest, if weary, principal directs her to attend an alternative school. From here, the story moves from that of a beleaguered and abused girl to one which chronicles a girl's ascent into womanhood as she learns how to read and retrieves her self-respect from the garbage where her parents threw it.

What sounds like a simple tear-jerker is actually very interesting stylistically. The scenes of conflict are very raw. For instance, when Precious and her mother have it out, there is no music to sway us, just profanity, grunts, and bodies being thrown around. And the cinematography was understated yet incredibly effective. I don't know if it was having worked with Robert Altman, but DP Andrew Dunn's use of long lenses was great. I normally prefer shorter lenses and more depth of field. Here, however, the shallow focus combines with the lack of non-diagetic music and sets to create a rather sparse cinematic world that always provided the right backdrop for but never intruded upon the wonderful performances of the actors.



By way of example, we have the apartment in which Precious and her mother live. It has this gaudy gold colored wallpaper with a baroque floral pattern on it. This singles the apartment out, in a way, as the other sets are very plain in contrast. When the wallpaper combines with the yellow lights, the place becomes almost surreal as it radiates a heat, a tension that is very thick and makes the apartment an arena in which the simmering mother-daughter conflict can play itself out.

Director Lee Daniels and screenwriter Geoffrey Fletcher deserve a lot of credit for populating Precious' world with important characters but never letting the movie stray far from our hero or lapse into a clichéd mentor-helps-poor-girl scenario. We learn a bit about Ms. Rain, a sympathetic teacher, and Precious' fellow students at the alternative school, but there's no perfunctory scenes giving us their background to fool us into thinking that these characters have been fleshed out to any degree. Yet they seem very real because we generally see them engaged in the mundane tasks of carrying on with life.

On the thematic side, Precious is a mess. I walked out of the theatre impressed with the style and characters but unable to discern any over-arching meaning to cull from it. There was a sense of hopefulness to be had that Precious' velleities were transformed into obtainable goals by the end of the film, however, was that all to be had? Racism was largely absent from the film although, tellingly, Precious has a crush on her white math teacher, is accompanied by a white man on the red carpet in one of her daydreams, and wishes she were thin and white in a bit of voiceover narration. In addition, the adults in her life trying to help – Ms. Rain, the principal, a social worker – are all white or light-skinned blacks.

I think you have to look at Precious not as a single inner city black girl and instead as an amalgamation of many inner city black girls. Her plight is just over the top as she is beset by problems Pelion upon Ossa. The film offers literacy and education as the way out, a message both Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. Du Bois could get behind. Unfortunately I think the parts about Precious working her way out of the hole that she finds herself in are largely obscured by the shadows of all the horrible things that have been done to her. It's not that I wanted a fairy tale ending but more scenes detailing her progress were needed to drive home the point that education is the ticket and to counterbalance all the horrible crap that has been inflicted upon Precious.

In the end, Precious is a moving film and full of ideas which are, unfortunately, scattered about rather than assembled into a cohesive whole. There's too much hell and not enough of Precious' ascent out of it. Regardless, it was refreshing to watch an independent film which wasn't about pretty white people in their 20s or any other indie movie cliché. It may be a mess but at least it's not Little Miss Sunshine or Waitress.

On a different note, I will say that I saw Precious at Sundance although it is playing at Eastgate as well. My choice of venue meant that the only person of color I saw in the audience was my girlfriend. Anyone else in Madison see it yet? What are the audiences like? Any reactions of note? Armond White reactions or something else?