Pushing buttons
With a tag-team like Tyler Perry and Oprah Winfrey producing, it’s not a surprise that lots of people are talking about Precious. What is surprising is the hype about a film that is so forumlaic it deserves a new category: Cry by numbers.
The heroine, Claireece “Precious” Jones (played by newcomer Gabourey Sidibe), has experienced a lot to make her–and us as an audience–a bit weepy. She morbidly obese. She’s illiterate. She’s about to give birth to her second child and she’s only 16. She’s an incest victim with a mother more concerned about keeping things quiet so the welfare checks continue unabated. Heavy stuff, but director Lee Daniels and screenwriter Geoffrey Fletcher aren’t finished with us yet. It’s not enough that she’s molested by her father–her mother continues the sexual abuse. It’s not bad enough that both of her children are sired by her father–the first one has Down syndrome. If that affliction weren’t bad enough, her uncaring support system trickles down to Precious, who names the child Mongo, short for mongoloid. It’s gut-wrenching and horrible, and yet the emotional hits keep coming until Precious becomes the stuff that torture porn horror movies are made of, daring us to look away.
The reason we don’t is based purely on the strength of the actors. Daniels made some unusual casting choices here (how bad is your life when Mariah Carey is your guardian angel?), and he scores with most of them. Carey is almost unrecognizable from her normal ditzy, diva self, stripped of glitz and glamour here, so that she comes off as both empathetic and professional in her capacity as a social worker. Paula Patton (Hitch) walks a tight line between tough teacher and caring caretaker. And then there’s sitcom starlette Mo’Nique as Precious’ mother, who is so repugnant and uncaring, she’s just shy of caricature. There’s talk of Miss Mo garnering an Oscar nomination, and it’s possible–she even gets the prerequisite breakdown speech that the Academy loves.
But as strong as the performances are, they can’t hide the fact that Precious is a manipulative, clunky piece of work that has a more problems that its title character. The film has won several audience awards and is currently enjoying high praise from critics and audiences alike, and the reasoning is probably one of gut reaction. It’s only after reflection do the cracks show, and some of these are downright troubling.
Should you see Precious? Possibly, if you know what you’re in for. This is not the feel-good, triumph- over-adversity film it’s advertised as. It’s also sly in its presentation where more than a few people might mistake it as a true story of folks helping out a poor black unfortunate, which it is not (that’s The Blind Side). The actors involved make Precious better than it should be, but ultimately that’s the only triumph shown.
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