Not So Precious

Though I'm pretty sure I'm never going see The Blind Side, the movie for which Sandra Bullock can now attach "Academy Award Winner" before her name, I can now say that I've seen nine of the ten recent Best Picture nominees. For me, the ninth film was Precious -- or, as it is ponderously titled, Precious: Based on the Novel Push by Sapphire. (I suspect this is because someone felt they couldn't just name the movie Push after the mostly terrible sci-fi movie poisoned that name earlier in the year.)

This is the story of a Harlem teenager, abused by her mother, subjected to incest by her father, and almost illiterate, apparently trapped in her circumstances but struggling anyway to get out. It's meant to be inspirational, but the circumstances are so extreme that anyone in the audience is probably fortunate enough not to be able to directly relate to them. (Most anyone who could directly relate probably isn't watching movies.)

In fact, to be completely honest, the circumstances are almost preposterous. It is frankly unbelievable that so much dark, awful stuff could happen to one poor girl. It's like every cliché of every one of these kinds of "hard life" stories was swirled in a screenplay blender, with a few extra bits of horrible mixed in besides.

It's borderline comedic, even. I wasn't going to say anything about this at first. When I was watching the movie and finding it almost laughable, I found myself wondering, "does this make me some kind of monster or something that I find this a bit silly?" But in preparing my thoughts on the movie, I looked at what some critics had written, and was reassured that I was not alone in seeing this unintended element in the movie. One critic even scathingly wrote: "...[Lee] Daniels is a director who would find it hard to imagine puddings can be over-egged, or that Monty Python's 'We're So Poor' sketch was meant to be funny." Put simply, the movie works so hard to be a downer, that you either reject the transparent manipulations it's using on you, or you just react to extreme sorrow as many people actually do in life, with unexpected laughter.

But the thing is, the movie finally does turn a corner in its last act. Not in its script -- no, that maintains its tone all the way to the bitter end. But in swoops some truly phenomenal acting to pick up the slack. Gabourey Sidibe's Best Actress nomination, and Mo'Nique's Best Supporting Actress win, are well deserved. The latter in particular just reaches out and snatches the award with her final scene in the movie. My head was still rejecting the overwrought premise of the film, but my heart could no longer reject that for these characters at least, it was very real. And this is probably a testament to the director, Lee Daniels, who was derided in that review I mentioned. Put simply, I don't think a comedian like Mo'Nique, given her roles thus far, could have found her way to such a raw and powerful performance on her own; clearly, a director with a real gift for working with actors helped her find it.

But in the end, Precious still remains an average (at best) movie lifted up by stellar acting. I rate it a C+. "Students of the craft" would probably want to watch it; I probably wouldn't recommend it for anyone else.