Gabourey Sidibe as Precious; image courtesy of moviedearest.blogspot.com
Before going into my thoughts on a movie that I already feel I’ll need to qualify and back into when composing my analysis, let me stress a few things.
1. I haven’t read Sapphire’s Push, which is the movie’s source material. Thus I can’t say how faithful an adaptation Precious is. I intend to read it, and welcome anyone who has a copy they’d be willing to lend to expedite the process. As you can imagine, it’s hard to find a copy at any of the local libraries right now.
Cover to "Push"; image courtesy of speaksista.com
2. I am a middle-class white lady, so I know I have some biases and blind spots. They may affect my analysis of the story about an abused, illiterate, fat, dark-skinned, HIV-positive black girl named Claireece Precious Jones living in 1987 Harlem during the height of the AIDS and crack epidemics who is placed into an alternative school called Each One Teach One after being impregnated by her father with their second child.
3. Regardless of the criticisms I’ll detail later in the post, I think you should see this movie. Yes, you. Especially those of you who are scared that its content will be too overwhelming, exploitative, or another cinematic example of poverty porn. If you care about the tenuous presence of African Americans in media culture, you should see this movie. If you care about the plight of marginalized groups, you should see this movie. If you are willing to back up these concerns with volunteerism, monetary contributions, or your industry, you should see this movie. And if you think that these kinds of personal and systemic hardships don’t actually happen to young people, you should definitely see this movie. While I agree with Teresa Wiltz and thus don’t abide by Oprah’s line that “everyone is Precious,” I’ve had too many friends and family members recount traumatic personal and professional experiences weathered by themselves, loved ones, peers, neighbors, and students to think otherwise.
I always like to enumerate the positives first.
1. Gabourey Sidibe is an awesome find as the lead. And I know it belabors a perhaps insulting point that actors are not their characters, especially in a role author Sapphire intimated to Katie Couric would have been near impossible for any survivor to play, but I find it comforting that Sidibe is happy, proudly fat, and confident. It’s evident in her talk show appearances on Conan O’Brien that she’s got the approachable star power of an A-list celebrity.
Here’s hoping that Sidibe’s performance will lead to further opportunities. I’d be so sad if she won an Oscar for this role, only to be sidelined by tokenistic casting practices. I already saw Academy Award winner Jennifer Hudson light up the screen in Dreamgirls, only to play Carrie Bradshaw’s personal assistant (and imaginary friend?) in the Sex in the City movie.
Hudson's Louise never mingles with Carrie's established friend group; image courtesy of nypost.com
2. Mo’Nique deserves the Best Supporting Actress Oscar for her performance as Precious’s mother Mary, who neglects, emotionally bullies, and physically abuses her daughter.
In addition to also allowing her partner (who we never fully see on-screen) to sexually abuse and twice impregnate their daughter, she also forces her daughter to engage in sexual activity with her, largely out of punishment for a gross, patriarchal misinterpretation of what consensual partnership is and should be. It’s a challenging, potentially damaging role that many actresses shied away from out of an inability to plumb terrifying emotional depths or out of an uneasy feeling that taking on this part could be misconstrued as promoting the idea that black women are sub-human.
To me, Mo’Nique does a superlative job negotiating how this woman is considerably flawed, morally compromised, and victimized by a system that encourages women of oppressed racial and economic groups to stay marginalized by over-relying on men, competing with other women and girls to keep undeserving men, keeping them bracketed off from educational and professional advancement, and convincing them that they don’t deserve better and neither do their children. While many people may gesture toward Mary’s knockdown fights with her daughter or her transparently fake show of domestic stability for visiting social workers as evidence of Mo’Nique’s powerful performance, I’d offer up scenes where Mary sits comatose for hours in front of the television or gives her profound confession about her daughter’s home life to social worker Ms. Weiss (played by Mariah Carey) at the end of the movie. These moments are informed by a series of photographs kept in a scrapbook that show Mary as a happy young woman in high school, with her partner, and her baby girl, and later distant and resentful of her, suggesting how mother and daughter came to their destructive relationship. In these moments, whether conveyed with glazed eyes, frozen in damning snapshot, or through a bewildered face made paler by make-up, we see a woman depressed and trapped. It becomes suggested that she is perhaps haunted by the same cycle of domestic abuse her daughter has lived through and at times as much victim as victimizer.
Screen shot from Mary's final scene; image courtesy of accesshollywood.com
3. As this was a concern for many skittish filmgoers of my acquaintance, I’ll say that from my perspective, I didn’t find this movie to be exploitative. Though I had issues with how director Lee Daniels would abruptly shift aesthetics and cinematic style, I appreciated that this movie wasn’t, say, all Dogme all the time. For one, surrealist flights of fancy is part of Precious’s coping strategy. For another, I think a movie that dwelt so much of the horror of the protagonist’s situation and environment would have veered the movie into exploitation, and may have also suggested that an authentic poor, black experience (whatever that is) necessitates aesthetic ugliness over compositional beauty. I found the unsettling moments to be handled sparingly, oftentimes providing a necessary jolt while also suggesting that Precious isn’t only her pain. The most effective moment for me was when Precious is given a reading tutorial by her teacher and, in a her embarrassment and frustration, returns to a particularly explicit memory of her father attacking her. Another noteworthy moment occurs when Precious is getting ready for school and sees a slim, blonde white girl staring back at her in the mirror — a chilling example of how girls of color may internalize normative standards of feminine beauty.
4. Man, did I ache for Ruby, Precious’s young, inquisitive neighbor who is clearly another abused child and is seeking comfort and friendship with a girl who is too damaged to see a kindred spirit. Some people laughed at Ruby in the screening I attended, especially in one scene when Precious is running away from Mary with her newborn in hand and knocks the girl over. Fuck you, I say. My only hope is that somewhere, later, off the page and reel, Precious and Ruby reconnect.
5. I’m assuming this is lifted from the book, but I was struck by how Precious is a proud and protective mother to children who, due to incest, are also technically her siblings. Watching her hold her mentally disabled daughter or breast-feed her infant son, I found myself confronted by how my own feelings about reproductive rights are informed by racial and class privilege and how the notion of “choice” is subjective. While I might personally be horrified at the thought of giving birth to children formed from prolonged familial abuse and would thus potentially remove our relationship, Precious views these children as her own. Mercifully, the movie does not judge her for feeling this way, and forced at least one (middle-class, white, female) spectator to think more critically about her politics.
6. As this is a music blog, I found the incorporation of music culture to be applied to interesting effect here. For one, there’s Daniels’s decision to cast successful recording artists like Mariah Carey and Lenny Kravitz, drawing out believable and unassuming performances that belie their celebrity and attendant glamor.
Mariah Carey un-glams it up for Ms. Weiss; image courtesy of createdintheattic.files.wordpress.com
For another, there’s the soundtrack’s song selection, which emphasizes contributions from jazz, soul, and R&B artists, many of whom are women of color, perhaps a reflection on the majority of the movie’s cast (thanks for the link, Kristen!). Some of the songs listed here are not period-appropriate and thus not heard in the movie, perhaps serving as inspiration and putting the movie and its source material in dialogue with generations of female artists. However, Mary J. Blige’s stirring “I Can See In Color” serves as the movie’s theme and is even featured in the scene when Precious finally flees her mother’s apartment. I hope she wins an Oscar too.
Then there was stuff that made me itchy in a bad way.
1. The opening credits are written in Precious’s semi-literate hand, then clarified through parenthetical notation. I don’t know if it was the result of studio meddling, but I found this borderline insulting. For one, it seems to imply that potential audience members can’t do basic decoding. For another, it undermines the protagonist’s particular system of written language, suggesting that it is improper, inscrutable, and in need of intervention from more literate, unseen sources.
2. As suggested earlier, this movie is visually beautiful, but stylistically uneven. At times, this is a blessing. Other times, Daniels’ heightened visuals were annoying, making me think more about how the director executed a shot than what the protagonist was going through in the moment. While I’d have to read the book to determine whether this is true to the source material, I found the most distracting moment to be when Mary visits Precious in a half-way house after leaving home and reveals that her daughter’s father has AIDS. This news and its personal implications hit Precious instantly, but the movie detours into another fantasy sequence where the lead imagines herself at a glitzy premiere. While this may be true to how Precious processes this in the book, the scene in the movie seems to suggest more about the director’s power over the camera than the protagonist’s complex emotional responses to trauma. I would have preferred to stay with Precious in that moment, but maybe some feelings are off-limits to the viewer. It just registered to me as an icky moment of authorial control.
3. As others have noted, the variance of African American skin tones and how certain shades align with class positioning is a source of contention here. As Precious is a dark-skinned black girl, it would stand to reason that her family would match her skin tone. This potentially sets up a binary wherein all dark-skinned characters are poor and uneducated. While this is challenged by the presence of Precious’s classmates, who vary in terms of racial and ethnic categories, the binary is evident with the social workers, who are educated, middle-class, light-skinned (often-multiracial) African Americans.
While Precious speculates about Mrs. Weiss’s background, the movie portrays her writing teacher, Blue Rain (played by Paula Patton), as a light-skinned, gay but somewhat desexualized, savior. If this isn’t clear within the narrative, the movie’s compositional elements make it explicit. How better to frame a middle-class, college-educated, light-skinned black woman teaching systemically disadvantaged girls than to cast a saintly glow around her through back-lighting? In this way, as well as how Precious navigates intersectional identity politics, A.O. Scott makes a case for how the movie is similar to The Blind Side, the Michael Oher biopic starring Sandra Bullock as his affluent and plucky adoptive mother, Leigh Anne Tuohy.
Patton's Blue Rain is Precious's light-skinned savior; image courtesy of nickelforathought.files.wordpress.com
3A. I felt like Precious’s Each One Teach One classmates could have been better developed. Perhaps this is a limitation of the format, as feature films don’t have the time to flesh out characters the way that television can. The Wire devoted an entire season to four pre-teen boys navigating the Baltimore public school system, following them until the end of the series’ run. If only more time and resources were given in movies and television to create complex, multidimensional characters who are girls of color.
Precious with classmates Rhonda (Chyna Layne), Consuelo (Angelic Zambrana), and Rita (Stephanie Andujar); image courtesy of thankgodimfamous.com
3B. I’m curious as to how viewers might interpret the dearth of male characters. I know that Ralph Wiley voiced his concern about with the lack of sympathetic men in Alice Walker’s The Color Purple in “Purple With a Purpose,” an essay from Why Black People Tend To Shout: Cold Facts and Wry Views From a Black Man’s World. I wonder if similar criticisms can be made here. We only see Precious’s dad during traumatic flashbacks, and even then he’s almost entirely obscured by shadows (something I’m sure Richard Dyer would take issue with). Other than that, we have a nurse named John McFadden, played by Lenny Kravitz, who came across to me as kind of a jerk who thinks he can fix any problem with a serving of organic fruit or a greeting card filled with money.
Kravitz's McFadden is well-meaning, if not a bit aloof; image courtesy of tapeworthy.blogspot.com
4. There’s also some characters who are left unexplained. One is a classmate of Precious’s in the Each One Teach One who breaks down for Precious the difference between the word “insect” and “incest,” supposedly for comic effect. That she’s one of a few white characters and coded as queer should be given more context.
Of greater concern to me is Precious’s grandmother, who takes care of her firstborn, Mongo, who has Down Syndrome. At no point is it made clear how she feels or what she knows about her granddaughter’s home life or even what side of the family she’s on. I really wanted to know more about her and the relationships she’s cultivated within this extended family.
5. Finally, the movie suggests that Precious’s final scene is triumphant, again suggesting further similarity with The Blind Side. But it’s also a bit of a lie. The odds are still very much against her, as they would be for most semi-literate, economically disadvantaged, HIV-positive, teenage single mothers. Not impossible odds, and certainly better odds if her love of math was further nurtured, but long-shot odds that don’t often reflect statistically-supported realities.
Taking all of this into account, I’m heartened that movies like Precious are being made and hope that more media texts grapple with such subject matter and fund more projects with African American directors, actors, producers, and other personnel across racial and ethnic categories. The movie apparently broke $30 million domestically at the box office, which is no small thing for a $10 million indie covering such sensitive subject matter with or without Oprah Winfrey and Tyler Perry’s producer credits. While movie-going can hardly rectify systemic oppression, it can get us thinking about it and maybe (hopefully) work together toward fixing it.
