SameSame.com.au ~ Inside Out Australia

Film - Precious

Reviews, By sammysf, 4th February, 2010

While studying at Uni some years ago, a friend bought me the novel Push by Sapphire. Admittedly, I was barely able to read the first chapter before I put it down. The story contains some tough subject matter and is written in a very stylised way, narrated by an African American girl from Harlem named Precious. However, the film Precious: Based on the Novel Push by Sapphire effectively makes use of this colloquial speech. The narration by Precious draws you in like words in a poem and leads you into the ugly terrain as if holding your hand while you walk through a rough neighborhood.

Precious, played by newcomer Gabourey Sidibe, is a teenager who is pregnant with her second child conceived by a now absent father. She is illiterate, and is given another chance to learn through an alternative school. Mo’nique plays her abusive mother, whose manipulative ways include collecting welfare money out of her daughter’s situation. The film takes place in the 1980s and the markers of the time are well represented – from the fashion to the social-economic disparity. The performances are first notch and propel the story in an engaging way. And there is even comic relief to make the darker scenes easier to digest.

We meet some very entertaining young women in the classroom taught by Ms Blue Rain (Paula Patton). Their dialogue is refreshing and captures the voices of girls desperate to discover new lives. It is not unlike the scene from Kids, where the Puerto-Rican teenage girls discuss sex with frank humor. The environment of Ms Rain’s class becomes the only refuge in which our heroine can pull it together to survive. When she is brutalised by her mother for the final time and thrown into the street with her newborn, it is her classmates that come to the rescue. When she breaks down and discloses to her class even worse news, Ms Rain implores her to “WRITE!” You get a sense that there lies a future ahead for Precious, despite the wrong that she keeps being dealt.

Though director Lee Daniels uses comedy as a foil for the ugliness in this film, it does easily go over the top. Mo’nique’s portrayal of Mary is amazing but the story is unrelenting in presenting her as a monster. It is shocking to see Mary treat her daughter the way she does at first, then it just becomes ridiculous. Even the greasiness of the food Mary forces her daughter to cook for her is excessive. It can’t just be chicken, it has to be pig’s feet. There was a moment where Mary could have shown some humanity, but instead we learn she is a child molester. In a scene with their social worker (played astonishingly well by Mariah Carey), Mary’s one moment to be redemptive is excessively ugly. It is at this point that this film meets its greatest weakness – its inability to relent just a bit on this woman’s lack of humanity.

Ultimately, Precious is worth watching. The story is actually very engrossing and made bearable by the quality of the acting (Mo’nique already nabbed a Golden Globe and SAG award).

I would even dare add that there is an element of camp in the humour, which, evidently, was intentional on behalf of the writer. If you really want a gasbag and are a fan of John Waters, one blogger compares Mary to Dawn Davenport from Female Trouble. Maybe this will convince some undecided readers to give this film a chance, it will not disappoint.

Watch the Precious trailer here: