Movie Review: Precious: Based on the Novel Push by Sapphire

All art is in some way manipulative. It’s trying to tell you how to feel, how to think, how to respond. Perhaps cinema is most manipulative of all. No other art form gives you so much information, instructing you in how to react. Novels can tell the same stories, but the moving pictures are the ones in your head. Paintings provide the images, but how you decipher them is left entirely up to you. Music is perhaps the most fluid of all the arts, offering emotional release anchored by little else. Movies, on the other hand, give you the pictures, the emotion, the music cues, the symbolism, and manipulate them all before your eyes to provoke the intended response. As Alfred Hitchcock once said, “I enjoy playing the audience like a piano.” But when a filmmaker is pulling your strings, those strings are supposed to be invisible.

In Precious: Based on the Novel Push by Sapphire, you can see the strings. How much of the problem is with the material or with Lee Daniels’ direction can be hard to tell, as the two often seem to be acting against each other. The film is the story of Claireece “Precious” Jones (Gabourey Sidibe), a poor, overweight black girl trapped in a life of poverty and torment. She is not stupid. She is uneducated, the failing of a system that cares far too little. She lives with her mother Mary (Mo’Nique), a cruel woman who accuses Precious of stealing her man. That this man, Precious’ father, raped her, and that Mary knows this and witnessed this, means little to her. Precious stole her man, and he gave Precious a child, with another on the way.

A school counselor sees Precious’ potential, and arranges for her admittance to an “alternative school” that will be able to help her. Once there, Precious meets Ms. Rain (Paula Patton), who believes in her. Also believing in her is Ms. Weiss (a de-glammed Mariah Carey), though she is far more attuned to the realities of the system. Will Precious overcome her poverty and her mother’s cruelty to get an education and raise her children? It would be unfair to call this a Lifetime plot, because it takes risks and delves into subjects far grittier than anything on the Lifetime channel ever would. But doesn’t this sound familiar? Haven’t you seen this a million times before?

Article Author: Arlo J. Wiley

Arlo J. Wiley is an aspiring filmmaker who has a deep love of movies, music, television, and most other artforms. He co-hosts the Gobbledygeek podcast and maintains its blog, which you can find at http://gobbledygeekbtr.wordpress.com.

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