Precious: Based on the Novel Push by Sapphire
Lee Daniels (2009)
Whenever a film is praised for being emotionally hard-hitting, it’s a safe bet that someone will get hit hard – literally – in the course of the picture. (This works both ways: Still Walking, which is emotionally hard-hitting, is tending to be described as ‘gentle’ because of the absence of sex and violence.) This was the first of three reasons why I was prejudiced against Precious. The second was that I’d got the idea it was not only grim but uplifting – this made me wonder if it was essentially a formula picture, and whether the grimness, however distinctively extreme it might be for a story of the-human-spirit-overcoming-adversity, was ultimately superficial. The third reason was the title, surely one of the silliest and most commercially anxious in cinema history. Its wordiness is thanks to another film called Push elbowing its way onto the screen last year in North America. (According to Wikipedia and IMDB, Sapphire’s book was called Push: A Novel and the movie, when shown at Sundance in 2009, was called ‘Push: Based on the Novel by Sapphire’.) The kennel name that appeared with the certificate caption at the Odeon went even further – Precious (Nov Saf) (Based on the Novel Push by Sapphire). Sic. What are they going to read out for its nominations at the Oscars show?
In fact, the physical brutality in Precious is sufficiently rationed and the emotional brutality sufficiently sustained to mean that the most violent set-to between Claireece Precious Jones and her mother Mary has considerable impact. Precious is a hugely obese, virtually illiterate black teenager. Her Down’s syndrome daughter, whom she refers to as Mongo, is also her half-sister; the story begins shortly after Precious’s father, an entirely absent figure except for the garish flashback in which we see him raping his elder daughter, has impregnated her for a second time. Precious’s existence in a Harlem tenement with Mary, a vitriolic couch potato living on welfare, seems to consist of being ordered to cook, being made to eat all the food that’s not to Mary’s satisfaction, and finding herself on the receiving end of her mother’s continuous, vicious expletives and, occasionally, abuse that’s more than verbal. The big fight takes place when Precious brings her second baby, a boy she’s named Abdul, home from hospital. Mary asks to hold him then deliberately drops the baby before going for Precious. The confrontation ends with Precious falling downstairs with Abdul as they try to escape and Mary hurling the TV set at them from the top of the stairs. The shocking power of this sequence consists not only in your fear for Precious’s and Abdul’s safety but also in the realisation of how angry Mary must be to do what she does here. (It’s the uncomical equivalent of the Royle family trashing their life-support system.) Then it occurs to you that Mary has probably reckoned she can get a replacement set through her social worker.
Precious also proves to be less soft-hearted than I’d feared – less unrealistic about the limits of uplift in the aggressively dismal circumstances of the heroine’s life. When Precious becomes pregnant for the second time, she’s suspended from school but the principal gets her a place on an alternative schooling project – ‘Each One Teach One’. Here, Precious is inspired by her teacher, Ms Blu Rain, to learn to read and she gets an appetite for education. At the end of the film, she’s determined to go further with it, she’s raising Abdul and she’s regained possession of her elder child, who was being looked after by her grandmother. But Precious, whose father has by now died of AIDS, has also been diagnosed as HIV-positive. Throughout most of the film, she fantasises: she imagines herself as a slim, pretty, white girl or living a celebrity high life of a very obvious kind – on a red carpet or a catwalk. But these fantasies are entirely pragmatic, a way of coping with an otherwise intolerable life. (The most surprising of them occurs when Vittorio De Sica’s Two Women is on television late at night in the apartment. Mary has fallen asleep, and Precious imagines the two of them in the Sophia Loren-Eleonora Brown roles, in monochrome, with Italian subtitles. Precious and Mary might not seem a likely audience for foreign language cinema but I could believe that Two Women might end up on their TV screen by Mary’s eventually losing the energy even to channel-hop.)
I thought I was paying attention throughout but there were crucial pieces of information which I missed: how does Precious get her elder child back, are her children HIV positive[1]? The lack of clarity on these points may be down to the screenplay, by Geoffrey Fletcher, or to Lee Daniels’ direction but there’s another possibility: I found it really hard to decipher Precious’s words – both in voiceover passages and in conversations with other characters. Gabourey Sidibe hadn’t acted professionally before; although this may well have enhanced her naturalness as a performer, she doesn’t have a trained voice – and a good deal of what Precious says is, understandably, delivered in a quiet, depressed tone. Before I saw the film, I was uneasy about watching Sidibe: this isn’t Raging Bull syndrome – she really is hugely overweight. (It’s more Darlene Cates in What’s Eating Gilbert Grape? syndrome.) But Gabourey Sidibe’s slow-burning performance, sensitively and patiently directed, wins you over. It’s remarkable how she seems to express emotion and shifts of mood through the fat of her face. She also uses her weight – and makes you realise that you expect Precious to be dumb because of the way she looks – to develop the girl’s sly humour in a surprising and convincing way. I especially liked the sequence when she’s staying at Ms Blu Rain’s place and the teacher and her partner are chatting about cultural things. Precious confides to us in a voiceover that she doesn’t know what they’re on about (‘They talked like people on TV channels I don’t watch’). When Blu Rain asks if she understands, however, Precious nods her head: she’s become socially sophisticated enough to know when not to speak your mind.
Mo’Nique’s portrait of Mary deserves the praise it’s getting. What she does in the climactic sequence, in the office of Precious’s social worker Ms Weiss, is astonishing – as Mary reveals how Precious was abused by her father, and for how many years (and the ways in which Mary herself was abused too). Because we’ve already seen Mary put on an act – sweetness and light, and wearing a wig for the occasion – for the social worker who visits her home, you can’t be certain that what she says to Ms Weiss – although it seems to come from deep, deep down – isn’t another pretence. (Even when Mary is breaking up, she’s still on the verge of getting verbally aggressive.) In spite of the brilliance of Mo’Nique’s acting here, these final disclosures made me uncomfortable in the wrong way. If we accept them as true, the effect is to explain Mary’s monstrous behaviour and largely transfer the blame for Precious’s suffering to her father. Because we only hear about him and what he’s done, it’s easy for the audience and convenient for the film-makers to make the father the villain of the piece. But that’s too easy: there’s no more reason for the buck to stop absolutely with him than with Mary.
The pop diva presences in the film verge on the bewildering at one point. As Ms Weiss, Mariah Carey is sufficiently deglamorised to make her less than immediately recognisable; Ms Blu Rain looks like Whitney Houston but isn’t. Carey is very good at keeping the social worker’s thoughts under professional control while intimating them to us and the beautiful Paula Patton, although her acting is more conventional than that of Sidibe and Mo’Nique (and Carey), does fine work as Blu Rain. The whole cast is good. The script gets round to presenting the other young women in the Each One Teach One group as mutually supportive in a facile way but they’re sharply characterised – by Stephanie Andujar, Chyna Layne, Amina Robinson, Xosha Roquemore and Angelic Zambrana – and their playing is well orchestrated by Lee Daniels. Lenny Kravitz does well in a cameo as a male nurse in the hospital where Abdul is born. (There are strikingly few male characters in the picture.)
The story is very simple, and it takes time to get going, although this probably adds to its gradually compelling quality. At the start, Precious seems so much more unfortunate (and, you can’t help noticing, darker-skinned) than anyone else in sight that you wonder how the character is going to work as typical (the picture is dedicated, in a closing legend, to ‘Precious girls everywhere’). I came to accept the way in which Lee Daniels and Geoffrey Fletcher took all the negatives of the time and place and directed them at a single individual but I was still left feeling that Precious was a very manipulative piece of work. Some of its rawness is achieved by fairly obvious means, such as a hand-held camera. The fact that the film is set in 1987 may simply mirror the source material: Sapphire’s novel, based on her own experiences of literacy teaching in Harlem and the Bronx for several years, was published in 1996. Yet the specificity of the date becomes a puzzle when the film-makers obviously want more flexibility – especially at the moment when Precious is looking at a screen which shows the man and the tank in Tianenmen Square in 1989. (Fantasising is one thing, clairvoyance another.) There’s a startling moment when Mary announces she knows she’s not HIV-positive because Precious’s father never had anal sex with her but, apart from the AIDS element and occasional contemporary references (the receptionist at the Each One Teach One centre mentions seeing Barfly at the cinema), I’m not sure that Daniels and Fletcher establish the 1980s setting very definitely. It’s possible that Daniels was keen to make clear the pastness of the piece principally to deflect criticism that Precious paints a negative picture of black life. If that was the aim, it’s clear from some of the film’s press that he hasn’t entirely succeeded.
30 January 2010
[1] According to the Wikipedia synopsis, Abdul is not HIV-positive but what about Mongo? Or was Precious’s father himself not HIV-positive until after the first child was conceived?