Precious review

For me, a review of Lee Daniels’s Precious, based on the novel “Push” by Sapphire, has to start not with the protagonist – an obese sixteen-year-old living in inner-city New York named Claireece “Precious” Jones (Gabourey Sidibe) – but with her mother, Mary, whose haunting and brilliant portrayal by Monique is certainly, for me, the most memorable aspect of this dark picture.


When I say that Mary is Precious’s mother, I am using the term extremely loosely. Though technically this abusive, bile-spewing woman did birth Precious and does keep the house where she lives, certainly she does not resemble the sort of loving figure that most of us think of when we use the term “parent.” Rather, Mary is dangerous and vitriolic, only showing any kind of tenderness towards her daughter when there is a social worker present to keep her in check.
Assaulting Precious in a myriad of ways – a frying pan to the head, an abusive spoken tirade, complicity in her husband’s rape of the young girl – Mary inspires fear even while seeming broken-down, slow-moving, and perpetually tired. When Precious hands her mother her newborn child (Precious’s second begotten by her father – the first suffering from Down’s Syndrome), we cringe knowing that something so tender can be so easily broken by such a demonic loose cannon.

But for as much as we hate Mary, a final monologue in which she attempts to explain her allowance of her husband’s rape of Precious gives a stunning vision of humanity to this monster. “Who else was gonna’ love me?” she stammers, fighting through tears. In this one, incandescent moment, Monique is able to show how the quicksand of depression, loneliness, and poverty can rip away one’s soul, sap away his or her humanity despite even the best efforts.

Such a dynamic performance is key to making Precious work. The film is not, as many critics have said, about bludgeoning the audience with the uber-grotesque imagery of life in the inner-city slums (although, be warned, there is a LOT of painful imagery) – rather, it is about one girl moving to conquer her past, breaking loose of the shackles of pain and pessimism that would seem to push her towards becoming just like Mary.

The main arc of Precious concerns the title character switching from an inner-city public school system (in which she is still held back in junior high) to a special teaching program called Each One Teach One. At her new school, she falls under the wing of Ms. Rain (Paula Patton), an encouraging and relentless teacher who pushes her students to write and write and write on a daily basis, knowing that literacy is the only way to truly open the minds of these troubled kids. None of the stereotypes of the “How do I reach these kids” movies (e.g. Sister Act 2, Stand and Deliver, Take the Lead, and SO many more) apply. Ms. Rain feels very real, and her crusade to help Precious – which, by the end of the movie, goes far beyond the call of duty – seems heroic, but not pandering.

Even while in her new school, Precious remains under Mary’s roof, still taking in the raw hatred that seems to come trippingly off her tongue. But a horrific event in which Mary attempts to murder Precious’s newborn child prompts the girl to seek safety. It is when she is finally away from Mary that we really see Precious take strides forward towards being able to have an active life. She finds love in the arms of Ms. Rain and her classmates and we actually see her smile from time to time (I don’t think she smiles once in the first hour of the movie). But Precious will be tested further, and must choose whether to give in to her painful past and settle for the continued spiral into spiritual decay, or to break the cycle once and for all.

What I really liked about this movie is that it refuses to let the audience judge the characters. When you see a random person on the street as obese as Precious, you may think, “Geez, she should just lay off the junk food.” But when you see scenes in which Mary forces her child to constantly cook greasy, fried foods and then eat the leftovers whether she wants to or not, it becomes impossible to make such judgments (would you really want to tell someone who hits you with a frying pan that you aren’t going to cook what she wants).

But, likewise, when we hear Mary’s gut wrenching speech at the end, we must think twice before condemning her outright.

What Precious is really trying to do is use this horrendous story to depict the complexities of our broken down welfare state. Like in season 4 of The Wire (probably my all-time favorite season of television), we see that the seeds of violence and abuse are sewn from an early age in ways that are uncontrollable and oftentimes leave one powerless to break away from it. Precious is punctuated by vivid musical sequences in which Precious visualizes herself as a Broadway singer, or imagines herself on the cover of a magazine. We also see a real scene in which Mary dons a blond wig and dances around the living room while watching tv – for me, the vision of a similar dream that had died and left nothing but vapors. Monique’s frightening portrayal of what Precious could become makes the girl’s struggle to break away from that predestination vital and earnest.

To an extent, I did think that by the end of the film, each new trouble that befell Precious started to read like a laundry list of horrors, but I think that this is just a result of some clunkiness in the screenplay, and didn’t seem to me like overkill thrown in to gain the audience’s sympathy as some have suggested. Surely, some people will think that it’s just too much to take, but for me, a story this real, this deftly written, and with such vivid performances is one that needs to be told and heard far more often.