When there's this much misery in a film, you really have to question what the point is of putting an audience through such an emotional ordeal.
As different as these two films are, in both cases, neither director nor writer gives any kind of overwhelming reason. For all the wild interpretations you could pull from Antichrist, the film is governed by little more than its spawned catch phrase: “Chaos Reigns.”
In the case of Precious, sadness and abuse reign, the power of education prevails and for all the terrible things we have witnessed over the course of 109 minutes, all we are really left with is shock and a vague sense of indignation. At what though? Incest, the welfare system, poverty, illiteracy?
These demons are all fish-in-the-barrel topics; McFocal points constructed for the sort of movie people might talk about without ever having really much to say.
Precious – The Bravery is All in the Performances
For all Precious’s thematic and conceptual shortcomings, though, the film features some of the year’s best performances. The titular character, the illiterate, overweight 16-year-old Clareece “Precious” Jones, (Gabourey “Gabby” Sidibe) goes through hell and back. Watching her go through one awful situation to the next (physical and sexual abuse, the second of two pregnancies) isn’t exactly pleasant.
However, the hotbed of tension between Precious and her violent mother (Mo’Nique) yields one of the great acting stand offs of the year. Mo’Nique’s portrayal of the resentful, abusive Mary is bound to garner some awards attention, and it will be every bit as deserved as the hype has suggested.
The script (Geoffrey Fletcher) stacks the odds up to evil-stepmother proportions, which doesn’t give Mo’Nique much wiggle room. She’s a monster and within the confines of that sort of character, it’s pretty mesmerizing work.
Sidibe is compelling, and the support (Mariah Carey and Lenny Kravitz both shine in smaller roles) is excellent. There isn’t a weak spot in the cast, who take the material much further than it ever should have gone.
Lee Daniels Has Chops, But Overdoes It For Precious
Peppered throughout the realistic horrors of Precious are fits of fantasy where Precious imagines herself in better situations, as a various celebrities. During the most heartbreaking daydream, she sees her mirror image as a thin, blond white woman.
While most of these dreams/fantasies feel consistent with Precious’s point-of-view, director Lee Daniels misses when using some higher cinematic language. The montages – occasional Scorsese-style cutting flourishes – are a little out of place and actually sever the dramatic pull in a few instances.
Precious’s narrative voice-over is also a bit out of whack (then again, so was Travis Bickle’s in Taxi Driver) considering the use of present tense. When the film begins, Precious is illiterate, and after coming under the guidance of a driven, young teacher (Paula Patton) at an alternative school, she ends the film at a 7-8th grade reading level. Impressive, but it doesn’t really cover some of her more eloquently expressed observations on human nature.
The Good, The Bad and the People on TV – Precious on Humanity
How Daniels and Fletcher approach humanity in Precious is, essentially, by not approaching it at all. If one were to gather a lesson from Precious, it would be that some people are terrible, no matter what their reasons may be. Others are completely selfless. And then, there are the people on TV, who are almost exclusively white (the story takes place in 1987, of course, not much has changed) and create false, impossible images for real life people (like Precious) to live up to.
Not exactly earth-shattering revelations.
Surely Precious’s story has something more to do with all these different (albeit over-simplified) types of people. Because there’s a bigger story going on here, one of class, race and human nature. Precious seems to bury these ideas, as if to consciously avoid topicality in favor of a simpler sob story more in tune with what Oprah’s audiences would want (she serves as an executive producer along with Tyler Perry).
All this doesn’t exactly diminish the fine work done in front of the camera, and Daniels certainly has plenty of visual flair in him. He just could stand to do a whole lot better by his cast.
RATING: 3 out of 5 stars
VERDICT: Precious is a little shallow on content, but the performances just about make up the difference…and then some.
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