Precious: Based on the Novel 'Push' by Sapphire (2009)
Directed by Lee Daniels
In Harlem in 1987, Claireece "Precious" Jones is a 16-year-old African American girl born into a life no one would want. She's pregnant for the second time by her absent father, and at home she must wait hand and foot on her mother, an angry woman who abuses her emotionally and physically. School is chaotic and Precious has reached the ninth grade with good marks and a secret – she can't read.
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What critics compared Precious: Based on the Novel 'Push' by Sapphire to
Informed by both Jenkins’ and McCraney’s own Miami upbringing, this environment may be gritty, but it’s not “Precious.”
The excessively charitable atmosphere at Moonlight’s New York Film Festival press screening led me to recall how Precious similarly won over a condescending audience.
It is one of the most well-written, well-acted and thought-provoking films of 2016, nothing less than a groundbreaking masterpiece, with content as compelling as other films such as “Brokeback Mountain” and “Precious.”
But while films like Ballast and Precious made it almost a badge of honor to rub our noses in miserablism, Jenkins is too sensitive a filmmaker to indulge in such exploitative tendencies.
Throughout, Jenkins conducts a symphony of naturalistic impressions from his cast, resulting in the most abundant handful of breakthrough performances since Lee Daniels reoriented the playing field with Precious .
Nik is a truly pitiable character – in some ways he reminds us of Lee Daniels’ Precious, or worse, a refugee from John Steinbeck’s Great Depression.
The parade of secondary characters includes Gabourey Sidibe (“Precious”) as the unfortunate dog-walker who lost Costello’s beloved Bonnie, Tom Waits — clutching a bunny — as one half of a husband-wife vigilante team (“We go around the country killing people who go around the country killing people”), and Kevin Corrigan being Kevin Corrigan.
The women in the film (Abbie Cornish, Olga Kurylenko and Gabourey Sidibe from Precious) are underdeveloped to the status of walk-ons.
Among them: grizzled singer Tom Waits (playing a typically random psycho named Zachariah), screen veteran Harry Dean Stanton (as a Quaker out for revenge), Boardwalk Empire's Michael Pitt and even Precious star Gabourey Sidibe.
Each new arrival is either famous (Harry Dean Stanton, Michael Pitt, Precious ’ Gabourey Sibide), insane, or both, as if creator and creation have become overly giddy with the possibilities of Hollywood.
As women are lamented as not being very fleshed out and easy targets, that is, of course, their destiny here with only Gabourey Sidibe ("Precious") making the most of a bad situation.
There are exceptions to the rule, such as Andrea Arnold’s American Honey, Lee Daniels’s Precious, Debra Granik’s Winter’s Bone, and Benh Zeitlin’s Beasts of the Southern Wild.
There is a clear distinction between the white-trash movies and those about black Americans in similarly straitened circumstances — Precious (2009), Beasts of the Southern Wild (2012), and last year’s Oscar winner, Moonlight.
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Sledgehammer hogwash of the shrillest kind, Precious suggests the Eddie Murphy of Norbit parodying one of Lillian Gish�s silent-movie bludgeons.
As in "Precious," where the miraculous Gabourey Sidibe kept us watching what we didn't want to see, so, too, the solemnly powerful Chiwetel Eijofor provides us with a reason for not averting our eyes.