Based on the novel Push by Sapphire

Precious is director Lee Daniels’ adaptation of author Sapphire’s novel Push, the story of an obese, illiterate teen mother (Gabourey Sidibe), pregnant with her second child by her father, who lives in a tenement with her disturbed, abusive mother (Mo’Nique). After being thrown out of junior high, the film follows her, sullen and basically non-verbal, as she is brought out of her shell by an alternative school teacher (Paula Patton) and a welfare case worker (Mariah Carey) and encouraged to tell her own story.

To call the film harrowing would be an understatement. No punches are pulled – Precious is subjected to every depravity a life of abuse and poverty can visit upon her. She is forced to steal chicken to eat, eats ten pieces and then vomits. She escapes periodically into fantasies of being on the cover of magazines, of being in “B.E.T. videos” with her “light-skinned boyfriend”. Ultimately Precious is able, thanks almost entirely to the performances of Sidibe, Patton and Carey, to pull some sense of self-worth out of the absolute ruin that is her life and make some kind of peace with what pain her small world has afforded her from birth.

The film played at Sundance and Cannes this year without distribution, and has built up a train-load of hype. After winning the Grand Jury prize at Sundance, director/producer/mogul Tyler Perry and Oprah Winfrey announced that they were coming on board to try and get the film distributed, which it eventually was, through Lion’s Gate. It killed at TIFF, and with good reason: there is a lot to love about the film. Sidibe as Precious is fantastic, and an utterly atypical heroine; Carey’s performance is muted and so stripped of glamour and make-up that she seems like a different person. Mo’Nique as Precious’ mother is legitimately terrifying, as menacing and full of violent potential as Deniro’s LaMotta. The story is the kind of story that never gets told outside of sad, obituarial news stories about children dead of horrifying abuse, as it’s a story of such ruin that it’s unrecoverable-from, for its characters. The only happy ending for a story like the one in Precious is one that is bargained for, dented and scuffed and compromised.

Is it a great film? Ultimately, no. While the performances are stellar and the story original and the filmmakers bold for telling it, the film sags and gets loose too often. This is arguably a result or the result of trying to be faithful to the idea of using a barely-literate teen girls autobiographical writing as the propelling force behind the story, but the films (few, and small) problems are to do with what was seemingly left out of the film. It feels like scenes are missing, and relationships between characters (Precious and her welfare worker Mrs. Weiss, for example) are too often described in exposition (well-written as it is) instead of built organically. There’s jerks and stops as Precious begins her journey to some kind of recovery, and there are as many unanswered questions as there are resolutions. Still, that those few flaws are the result of fidelity to the narrative thrust of an impeccably molded, original and fully-realized character like Precious is hardly more than nitpicking. Enough, maybe, to keep the film from being great, leaving it just very good. 8/10.