We saw this almost a month ago at NYFF, but were a bit baffled by it, so we just waited for proper release this weekend to file our review.
It’s kind of absurd, really, that Precious” (or, if you want to go by its more unwieldy official title “Precious: Based on the Novel Push By Sapphire has picked up top honors at Sundance and Toronto. This almost never happens, and as we watched the film at the New York Film Festival one question came over us. To quote the Amy Poehler and Seth Meyers bit on Weekend Update: Really?
Director Lee Daniels may have the film world convinced that his second feature, “Precious,” is the indie masterpiece of the year, headed straight for Oscar, but what he’s really done is bamboozled their sense of liberal white empathy with an empty headed style that garish and cloying. It’s really the con job of the year and it’s amazing that some are so blind and forgiving.
Yes, the performances in “Precious” are excellent — leads Gabourey Sidibe and Mo’Nique are probably headed for Oscar nominations, especially the latter — but the film itself is clumsily rendered, shockingly hamfisted in its narrative and exploitatively goes for every manipulative and contrived gag it can. The counterfeit director constantly plays on our sense of guilt and undermines every transitional moment in between scenes with some sort of forced visual conceit that begins to grate as the picture moves along. Every emotional moment is hijacked by some eyesore of a trick. A rape scene? In the middle of it, it flash cuts to a disgusting close-up shot of greasy, fried eggs cooking away in a skillet. It’s jarring, in-your-face, and like most of these moments, painfully calls way too much attention to itself. “SYMBOLISM HERE!” It’s practically as if Daniels is waving a flag just off screen for you to notice. Yeah, dude, our cinematic gimmicks were like that too… in high school.
The film starts out with titles scrawled in sound-it-out, illiterate writing and then are translated into proper English (we get it, she can’t read or write) and the audience gets a portentous whiff of the dubious stylistic choices to come.
From there we’re introduced to the titular Precious (an impressively staid Sidibe), an overweight, inerudite Harlem teenager who, as we learn from the opening telegraphed narration, has been impregnated by her father twice. The first child, who is retarded, lives with her grandmother. Precious is pregnant with the second child, living with her equally abusive (mentally, physically, and sexually) mother, ferociously played by Mo’Nique as a full-on hurricane of cruelty and savagery; she’s a monster. Expelled from school, Precious soon goes to an alternate learning program, headed by a woman ludicrously named Blu Rain (Paula Patton), much to the condemning chagrin of her mother, who is constantly berating her into giving up on education because she’s worthless. This is her opportunity to turn her life around and the one time the direction of the movie goes toward anything even remotely uplifting.
These school scenes, her “higher learning,” her empathetic teacher and her peers bring genuine warmth, laughter and soulfulness that is exactly how the entire picture should be in tone, but unfortunately, the picture is all over-the-map.
In fact, the unrelenting bleakness is so overwhelming as the movie grinds on that you wonder where, exactly, the humanity is in this thing and whether the point is to simply jackhammer the audience into sympathy coercion by gunpoint. We won’t give anything away, but considering this is set in the mid-1980s, you can expect the twin plagues of crack cocaine and AIDS to show themselves eventually and rain down on our already-battered skulls.
Actually, if we can talk about the “period details” of this thing, they seems dubious to us, if not down right erroneous. Most of the period atmosphere comes from the fact that the soundtrack is peppered with 1980s hip-hop jams, yet any other commitment to the period seems fleeting. Almost every character has access to a computer (in the mid-1980s the only person with a computer was Ferris Bueller — FACT), and during one climactic monologue, a character stops to apply copious amounts of hand sanitizer, something that didn’t come into mass favor until after 2002. Right. Small quibbles, but it’s little elements like this that take you out of the picture ever so slightly, and since the director has seemingly been doing his best to derail it the entire time…it all adds up.
Daniels’ unsubtle aesthetic, if you can call it that, is so assaulting and bloody self-conscious, it becomes a form of emotional blackmail. And it just gets worse and even silly. Why in god’s name would Mo’Nique, an uneducated welfare-check touting beast watch Vittorio De Sica’s “Two Women” on TV? Because it gives Daniels the haphazard excuse to launch into a random, out of nowhere black-and-white dream sequence where Precious can act out her woes Italiano neo-realism-style. It is actually meant to be a moment of levity, but it just comes across as gaudy and pointless.
In an effort to lighten up the mood, we guess, Daniels has inserted these ridiculous aforementioned fantasy sequences that are crude and self-sabotaging (not that he’d notice). Example: Precious walks by a mirror and instead of seeing herself, she sees a slender white girl. Another example: while her father is raping her, she sees the roof of her room splinter away to reveal the night sky. Shit like this is sloppy, cheap, utterly thickheaded, completely takes you out of the movie, and only adds to the film’s vulgar veneer. The feeling crept in more than once that Daniels and his co-conspirators had only a basic understanding of the fundamentals of narrative filmmaking.
Stuttering slo-mo (especially during scenes of violence seemingly to underline how violent it actually is; as if we couldn’t tell), jump cuts, dream sequences, jarring cuts or sudden zooms on a character mid-conversation, you name it — it’s a pile-on. And the cinematically-challenged filmmaker is more than happy to roll out any artifice in his cinematic arsenal check list to let you know just how deep and how powerful this movie must be (or just how great he is behind the camera).
A more experienced director (this is Daniels’ second feature-length film) would probably realize, “Hey, even Mariah Carey and Lenny Kravitz are great, maybe I should just capture these acting fireworks,” but this filmmaker cannot resist the urge to underscore every other moment with a self-reflexive maneuver that seems to shout throughout, “Hey, look at me, I’m DIRECTING!” It’s obnoxious and really disrupts your suspension of disbelief in the story several times. The affected style is hyper aware of itself just as we’re hyper-cognizant we’re watching a movie and can’t get sucked into what should be the heavy emotion of a brutal story laced with small glints of hope.
Still, for all the movie’s faults, it still manages to somehow come off as a convincing little drama and that’s a gigantic testament to the actors. The cast is surprisingly, uniformly excellent, including almost-unrecognizable turns by Kravitz and Carey (seriously, the latter is so good). And it’s their collective presence that bolsters the underlying sentiment of the film beyond the formulaic cliche: no matter how she gets kicked around, Precious stands tall and keeps on going (though let’s face it, that’s inherent to the picture as well).
There’s something classic about that, and genuinely compelling, and it’s also a ghetto fab banality. Girl in the hood does good while Mary J. Blige wails some distressed I’ve-been-wronged R&B melisma in the background; cut to still-going-strong credits. For all its moments of emotional power — especially that final sequence in the welfare office with Mariah that is gut wrenching and is 100% guaranteed to be Mo’Nique’s Oscar nomination clip — it’s kind of a lousy movie. And the acclaim it has gotten from film festivals is just puzzling. There’s some merit to the film to be sure, but it’s also extremely uneven, wrought with stereotype and achingly pedestrian at times. [C+] — Drew Taylor
**You also have to read Armond White’s review of this thing. He aptly describes it as a “sociological horror show” and says with characteristic hyperbole that’s gratuitous, but not without a point, “Not since The Birth of a Nation has a mainstream movie demeaned the idea of black American life as much as ‘Precious.’ “