Claireece Precious Jones (Gabourey Sidibe) is a woman oppressed on multiple fronts: in the home; in the outside world and most unfortunately by herself. She struggles to live a hopeful existence in an otherwise hopeless environment afflicted by unending emotional anguish brought on by intense physical and verbal abuse. In short, Precious is living in her own personal Hell. This state of torment and perpetual misery is presided over by her mother, Mary (Mo’Nique*), an ironic moniker that conjures religious connotations of a woman living a sinless life and/or capable of mothering (a) God. Mo’Nique’s matriarch in the Jones household, however, is a gross portrait of motherhood of horrifying proportions whose welfare depends on the check of the same name (welfare) while flying under the radar of concerned Government and Educational caseworkers.
The setting is Harlem, New York, 1987 and the images captured therein are photographed in a handheld vérité style that often shakes until the point of emphasis on a particular action is revealed. After a while, trained viewers will no doubt become aware of this predictability and build an immunity to the filmmaker’s desired result and just watch for the sheer joy of watching. But therein lies the problem. There is nothing particularly pleasurable of the film’s visual and verbal dichotomy. PRECIOUS is a contemptible entertainment in which its heavy-handed approach to finding beauty amongst so much tragedy is almost too much to bare. To add insult to injury (no pun intended), Precious Jones’s fictionalized story upon which PRECIOUS is based (“PUSH: A Novel” by Sapphire), is not very much unlike many of the stories that girls, women or men who experience personal trauma like this on a daily basis (in Harlem, NY or Anywhere, U.S.A.) find themselves in whether it be in an abusive situation at home, school or office space.
It is a filmmaker’s responsibility to put their protagonist through the wringer (when a protagonist is actually featured as opposed to a general documented subject) and can be witnessed in every form of entertainment that has graced celluloid, video or other medium from DUCK AMUCK to THE DEVIL WEARS PRADA. But come the climax when the journey has ended, there is typically the satisfying pay-off with an amount of gratifying retribution that has been earned as is found in most mainstream entertainment separating the cinematic pleasures from the displeasures. For the amount of misery inflicted upon Precious Jones in her cinematic journey, there’s not much 35mm data contained therein that doesn’t equate PRECIOUS to the popularly disreputable horror film (as opposed to the artistically dignified horror of Hitchcock’s PSYCHO or Clouzot’s DIABOLIQUE). That there is a more representative normality i.e. “conformity to the dominant social norms” present in PRECIOUS, as per Robin Wood’s analysis of the American Horror Film, PRECIOUS wouldn’t necessarily be categorized as a film of the socially accepted horror genre - - but it comes arguably close as it is a nearly two hour collective nightmare: collective, in the sense that it is the fusion of the nightmare of Precious’ life captured on celluloid by the filmmaker and the collective nightmares of the audience that are created from watching such intensely loathsome subject matter.
Wood argues that the basic horror film formula consists of three variables: normality (Precious’ daily grind in Harlem, Manhattan, New York); the Monster (Precious’ mother, Mary; her father who raped Precious thereby giving her two unwanted children and the H.I.V. virus; Precious’ inability to believe in herself who is almost always at odds with her alter ego, a white girl with blonde hair who she sees in the looking glass) and the relationship between normality and the Monster (Precious is invisible to the world around her and leads an existence that is comfortably numb).
Just as Christine Brown (Alison Lohman) is unable to escape the wrath of an elderly gypsy (Lorna Raver) who has cursed her in Sam Raimi’s DRAG ME TO HELL, Precious Jones is equally tortured by the demons in her orbit, albeit under less supernatural circumstances. Mary throws objects at Precious from across the living room in their besieged apartment and drops a television set down a stairwell in the hopes of crushing Precious and her child who are resting a few stories below; Precious is taunted by her peers and pushed to the ground when she least expects it. It is generally agreed that horror films are not meant to be taken seriously. So, to classify PRECIOUS as strictly horror with the added weight of it being based on so many true human documents attempting to share a voice for social criticism against such abuse, would be disrespectful - - but after just thirty minutes into its gratuitous landscape of sympathy smashing and domestic warfare, enough is enough. Wood intimates a psychological point that many people regularly attend horror films to ridicule or to laugh unless the film in question is overtly intellectual. Anyone screening PRECIOUS will get what they pay for: something very close to a nightmare (with unsteady photography). Wood explains that the horror film is “restricted to aficionados and complemented by total rejection’ and ‘they are dismissed with contempt by the majority of reviewer critics”.
Come Oscar time, although both actors worked their hearts out, Mo’Nique’s Mary has a better chance at AMPAS Gold than Raver’s Sylvia Ganush for the sheer fact that the latter’s performance is widely considered in the movie-going subconscious, an amusingly slapstick caricature of the evil gypsy. Blame it on years of B-Horror schlock generated by American filmmakers for the pre-determined snub. Oscar campaigns tend to be expensive and studios can be correspondingly faithless in pushing such an actor for the coveted trophy. In confining an argument for the approaching Golden Globes race, particularly Mo’Nique’s nomination for “Best Performance by an Actress In A Supporting Role” compared with Christoph Waltz’s nomination for the oppositely gendered “Best Performance by an Actor In A Supporting Role” as Col. Hans Landa in INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS, the portrayal of violence by the former is far more insulting than the latter’s elegant handling of menace who succeeds in doing so without uttering an obscenity. Even as Landa succumbs to his first and only on-screen act of physical violence near the film’s conclusion as he strangles the neck of a pivotal character, the scene exudes a Hitchcockian quality of love-making that typified many a killing representative throughout his filmography in such works as STRANGERS ON A TRAIN to FRENZY (whereas Hitch’s scenes of love-making resembled a murderous act).
Littered throughout PRECIOUS’s abrasive architecture is the consistent presence of the color orange. Just as Precious has difficulty fitting in with her peers (she is an overweight, illiterate teenager pregnant with a second child), orange is linguistically one of many words in the English language that doesn’t rhyme with any other word. In the universal color spectrum, orange (representing courage, caution and fire in Hindu and other traditions) falls between red (symbolizing heat, anger, passion) and yellow (signifying cowardice, enlightenment, ripeness, happiness) and due to its highly visible contrast in brightness to other colors is typically used to signify danger(s) ahead: a fitting choice for such volatile subject matter.
PRECIOUS is not so much exemplary of incendiary filmmaking as it is merely manipulative “poverty porn” that buries uplifting platitudes of clichéd enlightenment into bottomless depths of despair for sophisticated audience members to till through and unearth for deeper reflection. Amidst the exhaustive torment that Precious experiences, she herself has a mantra:
I want to be on the cover of a magazine.
I wish I had a light-skinned boyfriend with real nice hair.
But first, I want to be on one of them B.E.T. music videos.
that transforms her into a superstar where she appears amongst uplifting visual motifs by contemporary standards (when dreamed up by less than privileged youth) of a dancer in the gaze of dozens of spotlights as she is smothered by a handsome partner; an actress walking the red carpet after a Gala film premiere and an overwhelmingly colorful photo session where she strikes multiple fierce poses. When daydreams are not enough, Precious’ saving grace is the tangible support she receives from an understanding yet radical schoolteacher, Ms. Blu Rain (Paula Patton) at an alternative transfer school who reminds Precious that “everybody’s good at something” and who asks, “what can you do?” In time, Precious finds the will to read and write. She pushes herself to learn the spoken word to wield its power for the benefit of giving a voice to her story that has long since been silenced. Living in a comatose state for as long as she can remember, it takes the help of her new classmates and the tutelage of Ms. Rain and her admitting her love for Precious as a human being to wake her up to a new state of consciously hopeful possibility.
Besides Precious’ growing interest in reading, writing and in bettering herself by strengthening her abilities and intercommunication skill sets, her often times disagreeable behavior isn’t entirely sent into oblivion. She continues to harass a young neighbor in her building who likewise tries to show an interest in Precious and her child; she steals a bucket of chicken from a restaurant and eats the evidence while running from the establishment and mocks her fellow female students in her classroom which tends to mimic a tame version of a “Women In Prison” film sans the bars and the bondage. With a film displaying so much misery, it’s not very difficult for the viewer to become just as numb as the titular character. The tag line to PRECIOUS is as follows: “Life is HARD; Life is SHORT; Life is PAINFUL; Life is RICH; Life is PRECIOUS”. That may be true, but Life is also entertaining and for all of the aforementioned reasons shared above, PRECIOUS is not.
*Coincidentally, Mo’Nique’s character’s name in Director Lee Daniels previous film, SHADOWBOXER, was Precious.
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