I know I’m in a minority here as Precious has been praised to the hilt, but I have to say that rather than finding it harrowing and inspirational, the film struck me as contrived, manipulative and ever so slightly objectionable. It falls into that band of movies that seem to think that because they’re about terrible, miserable things happening to people, they’re more honest and true to real life than other movies.
However, just because you have miserable people who keep getting dumped on from a great height, it doesn’t automatically give you an automatic claim to authenticity. Misery doesn’t in itself make a story truthful, but Precious uses it almost like a blanket to rip an emotional response from the audience that it doesn’t really deserve.
The title character, Precious, is an overweight, illiterate 18-year-old, who’s pregnant with her second child (conceived by her father raping her, while her first kid was born with Down’s Syndrome). She’s also subjected to constant mental, physical and sexual abuse by her mother, who takes out all her life’s frustrations on Precious. The teen gets abused on the street, is suspended from school and may have a potentially fatal disease.
Precious is prone to escaping into fantasy to get away from her situation, where she imagines she’s a star on the red carpet or taking part in a music video shoot. These daydreams don’t actually help her situation though and are just a means to survive. However, she starts to see new options and a possible way out of her miserable life with the help of a social worker (played by an almost unrecognisable Maria Carey) and a new, alternative school.
While I’m all for tales of hope and redemption, Precious is stunningly manipulative, piling on the misery and pain to almost exponential levels. It works as a cheap crutch to engage the audience’s sympathies and emotionally manoeuvre them, under the guise that it makes the film somehow more true to real life. Underneath that it’s a far more traditional tale of overcoming adversity, with all the narrative shortcuts and sweeping under the carpet of the emotional fallout and social problems that entails. Terrible things do happen and some people lead incredibly tough lives, but there’s a sense that Precious isn’t really playing fair, and it’s using its never-ending list of terrible indignities the main character has suffered to cover up its shortcomings.
Director Lee Daniels really does use a sledgehammer to crack a walnut, and there are some scenes that are so clumsily put together they’d induce cringes in a less serious movie. It shouldn’t come as a shock that Daniels first foray into film was as producer of Monster’s Ball, another movie that tells a very standard tale but initially seems like it’s something more impressive because it contrives a never-ending succession of miserable (but in Monster’s Ball’s case, utterly implausible) things for the main character to suffer through. I’m sorry, but thinking up awful things that can happen to people doesn’t strike me as that impressive, unless you’ve got a genuinely smart and nuanced story to back it up. Otherwise it’s merely exploiting real-life misery to make a movie seem like something more than it is.
However Precious does have a saving grace, which is in the performances. Gabourey Sidibe, making her movie debut in the lead role, is sensational, with an utterly committed performance. It is her more than anything else in the movie that papers over the film’s OTT, slightly histrionic tragedy and turns into a much more human story. Rather like Bjork in Dancer In The Dark, she gives real heart to something that would otherwise seem overly contrived and convenient.
Comedian Mo’Nique is also excellent, but for very different reasons. As Precious’ mother she is an absolute monster, but it is again a very committed performance of a woman who’s so beaten down by life she’s lost any sense of right and wrong and who seems almost inhuman, except at key moments. Mariah Carey is also very good, in a role that calls for her to de-glam and show that she’s a better actress than Glitter would ever have led us to suspect.
However, despite the wonderful acting, the film can’t escape the fact that it comes across as a middle class fantasy of what people think misery and poverty is all about, made for people who want to feel compassionate and socially engaged, without having to really think about the issues the movie tinkers with. It is a daydream of the real, just as contrived as the sort of nice, jolly films that regularly get pilloried by the critics, but which coats its rather simplistic tale of overcoming adversity in a cloak of misery as an attempt to hide the film’s shortcomings. In fact, to suggest that finding your way past the awful things Precious is subjected to on an emotional, physical and social level is as simple as the film suggests, verges on objectionable.
I have no doubt those behind the film, including Oprah Winfrey and Tyler Perry, genuinely believed in the project, but that doesn’t prevent it from being contrived melodrama dressed up as reality. I genuinely wish the film was as inspirational it it aspires to be, but it ultimately feels a little hollow.
Overall Verdict: Great performances can’t hide the fact that Precious is a pretty clumsy film, which seems to want to trick the audience into thinking it’s somehow ‘real’ and honest, by finding as many terrible things to have happened to the main character as possible, rather than really genuinely dealing with the immensely complicated issues it raises.
Reviewer: Phil Caine
