Movie Review: Precious - Based on a Novel by Sapphire

Winner! - 2009 Sundance Film Festival's Audience award and Grand Jury prize. Winner! - 2009 Toronto Film Festival's People's Choice award. Winning such prestigious awards and being the official selection of other top tier film festivals, one would rightfully expect this film to be nothing less than extraordinary. Oprah Winfrey and Tyler Perry jumped on to the bandwagon after it won the Sundance prizes, both referring to it as a must see motion picture event. But is Precious: Based on a the Novel Push by Sapphire, the newest film by producer turned director Lee Daniels, truly the movie of our generation, as the hype machine would want us to believe?

It's a story about a grotesquely obese teenager named Precious, played by a non-actor named Gabourey 'Gabby' Sidibe, who is illiterate, pregnant for the second time by her absentee father and living a nightmare at home with her physically and mentally abusive maniacal mother, played by comedian Mo'Nique. The principal of her junior high school sends Precious to an alternative school designed to help young girls like herself, who are behind in the school system, with learning how to read, write and get their GED's. At the alternative school called Each One Teach One, Precious is guided by the caring hand of a teacher named Ms. Rain (Paula Patton) who gets Precious to open up about her overwhelmingly tumultuous life through writing journals. The new school does little to improve Precious' home life as her mother's primary concern is receiving welfare assistance and torturing Precious for being alive.

The performances were first rate. Sidibe did an outstanding job for a working student who never had dreams of being an actress. An almost unrecognizable Mariah Carey also pulled in a solid performance as the welfare worker whose job it is to know the details of Precious' home life. Completing the solid ensemble are the young ladies playing the other students in the Each One Teach One class setting who befriend the lonely Precious. I will be looking out for the cast's Screen Actors Guild awards nomination for best ensemble cast.

However, the film's potential for cinematic greatness was compromised by flaccid writing and pretentious directing.

My biggest problem was the character of Precious. She was formulated to be a pity party, nothing else. She basically suffers from everything under the sun that corrodes impoverished communities from the inside out, a manipulative ploy by the writers/director to make people care wholeheartedly about this film's heroine. They would have won my sympathy if they gave me more than reasons to pity her, like adding humanistic traits immediately in the beginning of the telling, individual forces that affect others in a positive way. But they didn't. For the first part of the film, we're left to empathize with a girl who was rude, if not hostile to people that obviously cared about her (Junior H.S. principal and child neighbor), bullied young children in her school four years her junior and stealing a bucket of fried chicken from a local eatery. When Precious learns of more tragic news to add to her already miserable existence, she cries, saying nobody has ever done anything nice for her, which left me asking, "Well, what nice things have you done for anyone?" Yet, her questionable character didn't stop a handsome male nurse (Lenny Kravitz) at the hospital from smothering her with all sorts of inappropriate and unprovoked love.

As for her journey of self-improvement? What journey? Writer Geoffrey Fletcher and Daniels didn't even try to explore Precious' odyssey in overcoming her hellish life. They simply glossed over it, supplementing such worthwhile conveyances for The Precious Horror Show, just to further shove it down our throats. So, we're suppose to believe that an ignorant, illiterate young teen like Precious finds encouragement after one trip to a museum with pictures of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Jesus, in the midst of her ordeal? Yeah... Okay.

There was nothing to admire about Precious, not until the end, by which point I was hardly invested to really care. Her character was one-dimensional. All of her conflicts seemed to be restricted at an interpersonal level, like a soap opera with sex, violence and foul language, courtesy of Mo'Nique's demonic character Mary. Ultimately, I was bored watching the character of Precious on the screen.

Mo'Nique's Mary, on the other hand, held my interest. Whenever she came on to the screen, I rose up from being completed sedated to watching this sociopathic monster torment this young girl. She was almost left in the Land of One-dimensionality along with Precious until the very end, where she exposes her inner demons in a desperate plea and sacrificed her tyrannical rage for an almost completely genuine moment. At the same time, the true trigger behind Mary's madness was never examined, given that her parent (Precious' grandmother) was a sweetheart, and made the character's demented outbursts look cartoonish and unbelievable. Despite that, Mo'Nique will most likely be nominated for best supporting actress Oscar.

Unfortunately, Mo'Nique's performance isn't enough to lift this film to motion picture excellence. Besides the scenes that dragged with Precious in the first half of the movie, the unmotivated, distracting, expositional narration drowned out the final sound mix of the entire film. I was wishing I could mute it as it only served to tell us what was going on with Precious instead of the writers/director doing the challenging job of showing us, overlapping images of Precious doing nothing but mill about her unbearable existence. The dream sequences weren't exactly helpful either, slowing down the telling of a story already moving at a snail's pace.

Also, the cinematography was atrocious.

Overall, I give this film a generous 5 out of 10 rating. The saving grace was the performances.

In the end, Precious left me feeling empty inside. There was nothing uplifting about this film. It was engaging a couple of times but for the most part, it was limited by Lee Daniel's soul-corrupting fixation on shocking audiences rather than just telling the story. The movie was well intentioned obviously but the hype-machine is hypnotizing audiences into believing that it is more than what it really is, which is the same old story of a victimized black woman who wants to do better for herself. I don't know which is worse; the character Precious and her tragic story or Oprah Winfrey and Tyler Perry promoting the film as if they made it.