Diamond in the Rough

Lee Daniels finds the right material for his extreme tendencies in Precious.

by Shaun Brady

[City Paper Grade: B+ ] 

There’s a certain petulant bitterness to that awkward subtitle that fits Lee Daniel’s heart-very-messily-on-sleeve melodrama just perfectly. It’s a grudging admission that yes, we’ve been forced to change our title because of an instantly forgettable Chris Evans-Dakota Fanning sci-fi/action mess unworthy of your attention, but we can’t be forced to like it. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with calling the film Precious, but somehow what should have been a credit has become brazenly enshrined as a title just as surely as if it were called Precious: Executive Producers Tyler Perry & Oprah Winfrey.

But then Lee Daniels has never been one to show his emotions subtly. The Philly-born producer/director goes in for volcanic eruptions of wretched excess, from the exhausting histrionics that somehow won Halle Berry the Oscar for Monster’s Ball to the sheer jaw-dropping audacity of his own directorial debut, the execrable Shadowboxer.

Daniels’ sophomore effort behind the camera is a vast improvement, even though it doesn’t correct any of his worst tendencies. Instead, in "the novel Push by Sapphire," Daniels has found a piece of source material whose own penchant for extremes gives his own a purpose. The harrowing story of abused, overweight Claireece “Precious” Jones is structured as a series of "Think that's bad? Well, get this … " propositions that dredge the depths of inner-city suffering.

Precious is an obese, illiterate 16-year-old living in squalid poverty with her abusive mother in 1987 Harlem. As the film opens, she is expelled from school for being pregnant with her second child, fathered, as was the first, by her own father, who began molesting Precious at the age of 3. The older child, who suffers from Down syndrome, is named Mongo — “short for Mongoloid,” as she tells a social worker with no apparent awareness of the term’s ugliness.

At the urging of her principal, Precious enrolls in Each One Teach One, an alternative school for troubled teens led by Ms. Rain (Paula Patton). As Precious bonds with her classmates and is invited into Ms. Rain’s home, where she plays Scrabble with the elegant teacher and her lesbian partner who "talk like TV channels I don’t watch," we're braced for the usual fade-out on an empowered heroine at peace with her sordid past.

Precious, to its credit even as it seems to overstep, never lets its audience off the hook to that extent. It mirrors familiar tales of classroom redemption, but each moment of uplift just leaves Precious with further to fall; it’s a melodrama that asks you not to cry, but to cry uncle.

Unlike the pretty white teachers who Make A Difference in their charge’s lives in all those Dangerous Minds-style products, the adults who reach out to Precious — Ms. Rain and a social worker played by a winningly deglammed Mariah Carey — mean well but are clearly overwhelmed in the face of the sheer enormity of the horrors perpetrated against her.

The embodiment of that horror is Precious’ mother, played as an abyss of human emotion by Mo’Nique, her every crowd-pleasing Showtime at the Apollo instinct carved away with a rusty scalpel. She is a singularly pathetic monster, tempestuous and frightened, grasping and predatory. Her blazing hatred for her own daughter is hard to look at directly; she wallows in her own self-absorption to the extent that her reaction to her lover’s abuse of her infant child is not shock but jealousy. She is the evilest of wicked stepmothers in this gritty fairy tale, reigning in a house not of gingerbread but of pig’s feet and congealed grease.

Mo’Nique, undoubtedly in line for the Academy Award, is remarkable; she almost makes you pity this woman before exploding into terrifying, withering rage. She is at the head of a uniformly strong cast, including Precious’ vividly sketched classmates. Lenny Kravitz also makes a strong impression as a male nurse who recognizes Precious’ crush on him and encourages it just enough to heal her self-esteem but never so much as to be cruel.

At the center of it all, of course, is Precious herself. Gabourey Sidibe sinks deep into her own body, hiding within her own flesh as protection from the ever-harmful outside world. Her eyes are as flat and affectless as her droning, matter-of-fact narration. On the rare occasions that a glimmer of hope plays within them, it’s squelched with a violent immediacy, as if afraid of being found out.

This subtlety is betrayed by Daniels’ insistence on depicting Precious’ garish fantasy life, quick flashes of the girl walking a red carpet or dancing in front of flashbulbs in lavish gowns. The gaudiness and emptiness of this escapism is almost more depressing than her joyless real life, but reveals the director’s strong-arm manipulations too nakedly. Not content with simply cataloguing his heroine’s wounds, Daniels’ overkill verges on a slavering martyrdom porn, a brownstone Passion of the Christ.

(s_brady@citypaper.net)

Precious: Based on the Novel Push by Sapphire | Directed by Lee Daniels | A Lionsgate release | Opens Friday at area theaters