Big Trouble

Late in the movie Precious: Based on the Novel Push by Sapphire, the heroine's saintly alternative-school teacher moderates a discussion of a book. "What do I mean," she asks her class of troubled girls, "if I say the author describes her protagonist's circumstances as unrelenting?" Here's what she means: She means that Clareece Precious Jones (Gabourey Sidibe) is 16 years old, weighs 350 pounds, and is pregnant with her second child—conceived, like the first, in a rape by her own father. Over the course of the movie, we will learn that Precious is illiterate, and she will learn that she is HIV-positive. In a menthol-smoky Harlem apartment, her mother, Mary (Mo'Nique), beats and molests her, force-feeding her plates of soul food to literally weigh her down. "Don't let it get cold," she warns, "'cause cold-ass pigs' feet is nasty."

Everything in Precious' life is nasty. The movie arrives in Portland as an Oscar frontrunner (backed by Oprah) with a vociferous backlash (deriding it as self-inflicted racism), but what you may not have heard is how much of the picture functions as a horror movie. Look how director Lee Daniels has designed that Harlem walk-up: It's as murkily lit as a haunted house, with Victorian floral wallpaper and gothic lamps. (When Mo'Nique's ogre of a mother pounds upstairs to batter her child, the scene fades out to the sound of yowling housecats.) Even Precious herself is a grotesquerie. I know that's a potentially inflammatory thing to say about an obese teenage girl, and I mean no insult to Sidibe, who carries her girth with grace. But when a movie shows its heroine running down the street with a stolen bucket of fried chicken, dropping battered thighs on the sidewalk while smearing most of her face with grease, that movie is not shy about pressing its racial stereotypes beyond anything in blaxploitation pictures.

But Precious is a classy exploitation picture, and that's a problem. Much ridicule has been lavished on the movie's extended title (any word becomes funnier if you follow it with "Based on the Novel Push by Sapphire"), but Daniels' filmmaking is severely hampered by that loyalty to the book. Precious' voice-overs tell what she's feeling when the director should trust his actress to show it. And where the scenes at home are singular degradation, the scenes at the alternative school are just as one-note in their uplift. Precious' teacher, a lesbian who is actually named Blu Rain (Paula Patton), exists purely as an angel of mercy, and her classroom admits none of the tensions of inner-city education examined earlier this year in The Class.

But every time I felt ready to give up on this blend of schlock and awe, Daniels delivered a moment of startling power. Precious' fantasies of herself as a red-carpet diva are an unsettling display of the boundaries her culture places on her imagination, and the movie makes an unassailable case for the welfare system, showing how the promise of money provides a lifeline for people who would otherwise drop out of society permanently. Mo'Nique's portrayal of malevolence is terrifying; when she holds Precious' newborn child, it seems entirely plausible that she will stub the infant with her burning cigarette. And when Daniels provides a late shot of Precious breastfeeding her baby, it transforms Sidibe's heft into a blanket of maternal warmth that her own mother could never comprehend.

For all this, Precious is not quite a good movie: Its two halves never manage to cohere. But I see how it could serve as a uniquely cathartic one, especially to survivors of abuse. The piling on of cruelty—those "unrelenting circumstances" that threaten to make Precious a scapegoat for every variety of shame and self-hatred—eventually feels like a purging: All of this was done to us, and we won't look away. This is never more true than in the movie's penultimate scene, a volcanic confession by mother Mary that rips away all masks from her ravenous narcissism, decisively blocking the temptation to grant her cheap forgiveness. But something is missing from this scene, which cuts between Mo'Nique and an appalled social worker, played (subtly!) by Mariah Carey. What's missing from this scene is Precious. The camera barely shows her reaction. In the movie's confrontation of predation and neglect, the victim is once again neglected. Precious escapes the horror show of her world. The movie isn't so lucky.

is rated R. It opens Friday at Fox Tower and Lloyd Mall.

WWeek 2015