Review: Precious

Precious: Based on the Novel ‘Push’ By Sapphire opens with a shot of a crimson scarf caught on a lamppost, swirling helplessly above the mean streets of 1987 Harlem. A bright smear against a dull grey backdrop, it’s an image of beauty. We’re meant to read this as a symbol of the audacity of hope, a point director Lee Daniels hammers home when his title character offers that scarf to a young neighbour and fellow abuse survivor later in the film.

First-time actor Gabourey Sidibe invests her embattled character with poise, strength and even joy.

Hope and beauty are hard-won commodities for Claireece Precious Jones, a protagonist who bears the weight of countless everyday atrocities. When we meet her, she is 16, poor, functionally illiterate and carrying her second child. This baby, like her first, is the product of incest at the hands of her father, who has been raping and molesting the young girl since she was in diapers.

That’s only one aspect of the physical and psychological assaults Precious endures on a regular basis. At school and on the streets, her girth makes her the target of stares and jeers. At home, her mother (played with chilling precision by the comedian Mo’Nique) hurls a steady barrage of insults and heavy objects at the flinching teenager.

If Precious appears impassive and sluggish, her inner life is anything but. She indulges in escapist flights of fantasy – one moment, she’s in heels and a feather boa on a red carpet, the next she’s kissing an imaginary boyfriend – all of which Daniels depicts with the glitz of a music video. Intended to offer respite from the awfulness of the narrative, these abrupt shifts in tone can feel uncomfortably jarring. For Daniels, these sequences allow us to see the rich imagination of a character that many have written off as a lost cause.

Precious is based on the 1996 novel Push by the African-American writer Sapphire, and like its source material, the film emphasizes the power of literacy and finding one’s voice as a tool to help the oppressed achieve empowerment. The opportunity for real escape comes in the form of creative expression: Precious stumbles into the welcoming arms of Blu Rain (Paula Patton), a teacher with a social conscience who helps girls who’ve fallen through the cracks. In Ms. Rain and this trash-talking cabal of streetwise peers, Precious finds community — asked how she feels about speaking in class for the first time, she stutters, "I feel here." Gradually, she figures out how to tell her story.

While there’s a whiff of the saintly-pedagogue-saves-hapless misfit cliché here, Precious’s process of self-discovery is gradual enough to avoid becoming cheesy. Fine performances prevent the film from veering too far into territory like Dangerous Minds. As Ms. Rain, Patton is nicely understated. The other students – particularly Amina Robinson, as the taciturn butch Jermaine – bring a rawness and depth to their roles that in lazier hands would have become patronizing caricatures. And though it’s not quite the tour de force that the hype would have you believe, Mariah Carey’s un-glam performance as a feckless social worker is solid.

But Gabourey Sidibe outshines them all. Her portrayal of Precious is tremendously respectful and also very convincing. Novelist Sapphire was careful to emphasize that, even in her darkest moments, Precious refused to view herself as a victim. In bringing the book to the screen, Daniels and screenwriter Geoffrey Fletcher lose a good deal of that tenacity. Nevertheless, Sidibe invests this character with poise, strength and even joy. She’s matched by the brute force of Mo’Nique’s turn as mother Mary Johnson, a performance that will undoubtedly earn the comic an Oscar.

Both women work hard to avoid turning these layered characters into crass archetypes. By its very nature, movie-watching is a voyeuristic exercise, and Precious teeters on the edge of becoming some variation of what Salon writer Erin Aubry Kaplan refers to as "ghettotainment," an exercise in parading the trials and tribulations of a troubled black community onscreen for consumption by a judgmental, privileged audience.

Still, there is something powerful about bearing witness to an honest, unflinching portrait of both a character (a large, poor black girl) and subject matter (childhood incest, the holes in social safety nets) that many people would rather keep in the closet. Precious’ story is a life too often lived.

Precious is a bracing film, but it’s also a flawed one. Too often, Daniels wallops us with crass, inelegant cues – a shot of sizzling meat intercut during a rape scene, an awkward meta-moment in which Blu Rain asks her students, "What does it mean when the author describes the protagonist’s circumstances as unrelenting?" These choices suggest the director doesn’t believe his audience will grasp the Important Message he’s trying to convey. If only he’d placed as much faith in Precious as his protagonist ultimately has in herself.

Precious opens in Toronto on Nov. 20 and the rest of the country on Nov. 27.

Sarah Liss writes about the arts for CBCNews.ca.