Precious (2009) Review

Official trailer

A girl who can’t read is pregnant for the second time by her father, lives with a mother who’s violent, and is removed from school for it. A teacher gives her a notebook and tells her to write something every day.

The 8 is for a film about an abused child that refuses the two available modes. They’re misery and uplift. The material is extremely difficult and the film keeps finding room for humor, fantasy and specific small competence. What holds it off higher is a fantasy device that’s used slightly too often and a final act that resolves the mother into an explanation. That’s a softer choice than the rest of the film makes.

What I like most is how funny Precious is. A film this hard could have made her nothing but a victim, and I respect it enormously for letting her keep her sarcasm. The laughs always come from her side of the room, and they make the cruelty around her more painful.

The Fantasy Sequences

When something intolerable is happening, the film cuts to Precious imagining herself on a red carpet, in a musical, or being photographed, and then cuts back.

That device does two things. It gives the audience an exit the character has invented for herself, and it establishes that she has an interior life the film’s circumstances have no access to.

The technique is also the film’s most criticized element and the criticism has a point. It appears often enough that some of the intercutting reads as the film sparing itself instead of sparing her.

I’m with the critics here. By the later cuts to the red carpet I stopped feeling her escape and started feeling the film’s. I’d have cut about half of them, and the hospital scene would hit even harder for it.

Where it works completely is the one time she can’t reach it. Late in the film something happens and the fantasy doesn’t arrive, and the absence of a device the audience has learned to expect is the most frightening moment in the picture. That withholding is placed at the hospital, where the fantasy would be most welcome and doesn’t come, and the film simply stays in the room with her for the duration of it.

Mo’Nique

Mary is the mother, is physically and verbally abusive, has known what was happening for years, and the performance is the reason the film is more than its subject. What makes it work is that she’s not played as a monster. Mary is bored, lazy, watching television, resentful in a low-level continuous way, and the violence arrives as an extension of the boredom and not as an event.

The television is on in almost every scene in that apartment and it’s never commented on. Game shows, daytime programming, noise, and the film establishes a household where the only voice that gets listened to is a broadcast.

The scale of it is also domestic. She throws things, she hits, she says specific cruel things, and all of it happens in a small apartment during ordinary activity. That’s how this really occurs and is almost never filmed. The last scene is her explanation, delivered to a social worker, and it’s the film’s most difficult ten minutes. She accounts for herself completely, the account is coherent, and the film gives her no relief and doesn’t let the audience dismiss her either.

Mo’Nique is astonishing in that scene, and it’s also where my reservation sits.

She never plays for sympathy or for disgust, and I believed every word. I still wish the script hadn’t given Mary a full explanation. The woman on the couch with the television blaring frightened me more when I couldn’t see her reasons.

Mo’Nique has said she drew on her own family history for it. That’s context that’s been widely reported and doesn’t change the reading. What’s on screen is a woman accounting for herself in terms that make sense to her.

Sidibe

She was a college student with no acting experience and the performance is built almost entirely on withholding.

Precious is watchful, almost silent for the first half, and delivers most of her dialogue in voiceover. That’s the film’s method for a character who has learned that speaking is dangerous.

Her weight is also handled without a single line about it. Nobody in the film delivers a speech on the subject, the camera doesn’t linger, and the fact is present throughout as a fact and not as a theme.

What Sidibe finds is the humor. Precious is funny in her narration, is contemptuous of things worth being contemptuous of, and has a dry assessment of everybody she meets that the film lets her keep.

The mathematics teacher line is the clearest example of it. She observes that she’s good at math and nobody has ever asked, and the film delivers it as an aside instead of as a revelation about untapped potential.

That restraint is smart. A lesser movie would have put swelling music under that line, and this one lets her shrug and move on.

The progression is also physical. She begins occupying as little space as possible and by the last act is standing differently, and none of that is commented on by anybody in the film.

The voiceover also changes. Early on it is defensive and by the end it’s describing things. That’s the film tracking her literacy through the narration itself instead of through anybody telling her she’s improved. (More on International Literacy Day)

The Alternative School

The classroom material is where the film finds its structure and it’s the most conventional thing in it, which the film needs. Paula Patton’s Blu Rain is a teacher who’s competent and specific. She doesn’t deliver speeches, she assigns work, reads the notebooks, writes back, and the relationship is conducted almost entirely in writing. Physically, the classroom is also specific. It’s a small room in a building that’s not a school, with a handful of desks and a whiteboard, and the film establishes that the institution barely exists before it establishes what happens inside it.

That’s the correct choice for a film about learning to read. The teacher and the student communicate on paper, the audience sees the handwriting improve, and the progress is visible instead of asserted. The other students are given personalities and jokes and their own small plots, and the classroom is the only place in the film where anybody is enjoying themselves. That makes it function as relief without becoming sentimental.

My favorite stretch of the film is the classroom scenes. After that apartment, those desks and that whiteboard feel like oxygen, and I wanted more time with those students than the film gives me. Their introductions are handled in one sequence of each of them stating a name and a reason for being there, and the film gets six characters established in about ninety seconds without any of them becoming a type.

Mariah Carey is also in it as a social worker and is almost unrecognizable, playing the part without makeup and with no attempt at presence. The casting sounds like a stunt and the performance is a tired municipal employee doing a difficult job adequately.

Sandra Bullock and The Blind Side

Best Actress in 2010 went to Sandra Bullock for The Blind Side. Sidibe was nominated and this page argues she should have won. The comparison is the reason the pairing is so often cited. The Blind Side is a film about a wealthy white woman taking in a homeless Black teenager, told from her position, in which his interior life is largely absent. This film is about a Black teenager told from her position, in which her interior life is the entire method.

Both were released in the same awards season and the Academy rewarded the first for its lead performance. That’s the same pattern as Driving Miss Daisy, Crash and Green Book elsewhere on this page, applied to an acting category. The Blind Side also took around three hundred million dollars and this film took around sixty-three. That’s the other variable. A performance in a film a hundred million people have seen is a different proposition to voters than one in a film they had to seek out. This film did win two, for Mo’Nique and for Geoffrey Fletcher’s screenplay. That made him the first Black writer to win in the category. Best Picture went to The Hurt Locker, which nobody argues with.

Oprah Winfrey and Tyler Perry attached themselves as executive producers after Sundance. It’s the reason a film this difficult reached the audience it did. Distribution for material like this depends on somebody with standing deciding to spend it.

Sapphire’s novel is written entirely in Precious’s spelling, which degrades and improves as she learns, and that’s the one thing the film can’t reproduce. A film can show handwriting and it can’t put the reader inside an evolving orthography.

Should you watch Precious?

Yes, with a warning about the content. It’s an 8 from me because it refuses both misery and uplift, plays the mother as bored instead of monstrous, trusts a first-time lead who built the whole performance on withholding, and lets two people talk through handwriting. The overused fantasy cuts and the tidy explanation for Mary keep it out of the 9s, and I’m still irritated that Sidibe lost Best Actress to The Blind Side.

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