Precious - a difficult film?

Precious, Lee Daniels’s screen adaptation of the 1997 novel, Push, by New York poet Sapphire, is less a rollercoaster of emotion than a nine-pound sledgehammer of unrelenting torment that hits you right between the eyes. From a critical perspective this is both a curse and blessing. Indeed, so disturbing are some of the key moments that, dare I say it, by the final quarter one starts to become relatively inured to the ordeal. What starts out as a stark, often grotesque, but never-less-than compelling film begins to feel strangely tired, so mired in its own horror that it feels uncertain about how it should bring itself to a satisfying, narrative resolution. Because despite its Indie credentials and its triumphant reception at the Sundance and Cannes festivals, Precious is, structurally, very much a mainstream film that does demand a resolution. It does finally end with hope of some sort, although knowing the political and social trajectory of late-Eighties New York (the film is set in 1987) one can assume that nothing hopeful should be taken for granted. That is not to say that it fails as such, or that this should detract from the remarkable performances of its two main stars in particular, but it does suggest that it is so heavily loaded with suffering that the storytelling begins to dull slightly, ultimately deferring to the weight of the message. For obvious commercial reasons the literal expression of the unfolding tragedy is in many ways artfully done, anesthetised even, but the overarching implication is never less than crystal clear: for a certain and not insignificant proportion of American society, life is only tragedy, little more than a remorseless succession of personal, familial and systemic failures against which any flecks of hope and light, any gestures at breaking the cycle, however small, will ultimately be snuffed out without the help of an extraordinary coterie of golden-hearted guardian angels. And if that sounds rather like a variation on a fairytale, then herein lies one of the films flaws. Precious is powerful, affecting and important but it falls frustratingly between camps, caught between two, or arguably three, narrative and aesthetic impulses: horror, hope and beauty.

Claireece “Precious” Jones (a remarkable debut by Gabourey Sidibe) is an obese, illiterate, African-American teenager growing up in New York’s Harlem borough. She is pregnant with her second child by her own father, who rapes her under her own mother’s impassive gaze; she is repeatedly physically and mentally maltreated by her mother (an extraordinary, intense performance by US comedian and chat show host, Mo’Nique); she is humiliated by her peers on a daily basis; and, it later transpires to our horror as we imagine, and hope, that she is through the very worst, she is HIV+ as a result of her sexual abuse. Expelled by her school because of her pregnancy she transfers to an alternative facility, Each One/Teach One, where her (saintly/serene/beautiful) teacher, Blu Rain (Paula Patton) urges her to search deep inside herself for salvation from the living hell in which she is trapped. For while she is physically impassive, a near-silent, murmuring mass of unyielding, repressed agony, inside she is a richly imaginative young woman (although in imagining herself to be white on one occasion she demonstrates palpable self-loathing.) It is a contradiction that Daniels plays out through a series of woozy, fantasy vignettes. On her journey to self-realisation and a relative empowerment she encounters a supporting cast of compassionate individuals – a nurse (Lenny Kravitz), a social worker (a revelatory Mariah Carey), her assorted band of new misfit classmates – who encourage her in their own unique ways to push herself to escape.

Precious will provoke two polarised responses when it is released in the UK: one from those who are shocked, shattered but ultimately inspired by a powerhouse narrative and the scorching emotion that demands you engage with the horrors against which some people must battle merely to wake up each morning. And one from those unable to see beyond a heavy-handed sequence of hackneyed clichés that assault them with every emotional trick in the book, forcing a passive audience to engage with a situation with which they have, ultimately, little in common. This makes Precious, in many ways, a contradictory film, one at once propelled by the hope that must prevail and yet one simultaneously pulled back by the sheer scale of horror that its protagonist has to endure. This makes it stylistically ambiguous, too, for while it is genuinely harrowing in parts it is also undeniably attractive, particularly as more colour and light floods in, literally, as the metaphorical light shines brighter also. Accusations of exploitation and “pornographying” the violence will surely follow. This inherent stylistic/narrative conflict is one that looms large in realist cinema and is one that Daniels, in as much as this is a “realist” film, has failed to resolve. Yet one can understand from a commercial perspective why he may have baulked at a visually more repressive approach, in the manner of, say, Gary Oldman’s 1997 tour-de-trauma, Nil By Mouth. The subject matter may be unpalatable but the film, to attract the Cineplex audience at which it is ultimately now targeted, needs to be, at the very least, bearable (one of the film’s Executive Producers is that most vigorous flag waver for mainstream American positivity and self-actualisation, Oprah Winfrey.)

For all these reasons I found Precious a difficult film, in every sense. It is courageous, no doubt, and is superficially a remarkable story bolstered by some remarkable performances. So I urge you to seek it out. But as to whether it lives up to the Sundance and Cannes hype, I am less sure. To me it feels like Daniels has missed the resolution that he sought when adapting the book, and the hope and the power of ”pushing” back at adversity, however ubiquitous, never really materialises in full. The US playwright John Guare once said that audiences should not be fed a replication of life but “have to earn the truth.” If this is so, and I am inclined to agree, the danger with Precious is that these contradictions will leave this audience in a kind of suffocating no-mans land, unable to decide where to go from here.