PRECIOUS is the story of a big girl with some huge problems.


STARRING: Gabourey Sidibe, Mo'nique, Paula Patton, Mariah Carey, Sherri Shepherd, Lenny Kravitz
 
Directed by Lee Daniels

Executive Producers: Oprah Winfrey, Tyler Perry, Lisa Cortes, Tom Heller

RELEASED: 29 January 2010
 
CERTIFICATE: 15a
R/T: 109 MINUTES

Trailer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b5FYahzVU44

You know when you drive past a particularly bad car crash and you can’t help but slow down and have a snoot to try to see what’s happened. You can’t wait to get to where you’re going so you can tell everybody there about all the messed up horror and carnage that you’ve just witnessed. That’s the feeling Precious will leave you with. You just need to tell people about it and if you find someone else who has seen it too, you will spend an hour comparing notes.

It begins with a 16-year old girl (Precious) who looks like a female Biggie Smalls, daydreaming about her handsome, white math teacher in her Harlem school in 1987. It’s clear it’s never going to work and you feel a bit bad for Preciuos. It’s sweet though.

Ten minutes later all thoughts of anything sweet have been wholloped out of your brain. Precious’s mother clocks her in the head with a glass and she slips into a flashback of her father raping her. The result of this crime is that she gets kicked out of school for being pregnant.

Precious’s Vice principal sees that all is not right in Precious’s life and convinces her to enroll in an alternative school which provides her some uplifting Good Will Hunting type moments, but this also highlights how little education she has received in her 16 years in Harlem during the Reagan years. Racism and discrimmination are not the point of this film but clearly they shape the reality in which the characters live. Undereducation and welfare dependance are all over the shop.

The sets and scenery reflect the racial background of the characters. There are rich chocolates and oranges everywhere. Brown is beautiful, and it’s all over the screen.

The positives of Precious’s new schoollife are darkly contrasted by her homelife and, although the rape is never topped, there is powerful blow after powerful blow knocking the crap out of any audience member with a modicum of empathy. Everytime you think she has managed to engineer a way out of her horrible life, something new comes along and knocks her way back.

This film has won 43 awards to date, that number is slightly inflated because it was eligible for minority competitions (Avatar was never going to pick up Best Film at the Balck Reel Awards), but it did go down a storm at Sundance and Cannes and director Lee Daniels scooped a Golden Globe. Naturally some Oscar buzz is now surrounding this little pic.

The performance of former comedian Mo’Nique as Precious’s montrous, sociopathic mother has been a big contributor to the film’s awards haul. She is best known as the mother from the light weight sit-com the Parkers, but here she gives a powerful performance as a woman who is verbally and physically abusive to the child she blames for taking her man away. Almost every word out of her mouth carries an air of menace.

The cast are mainly unknowns, but there are two big names kicking about. Lenny Kravitz pops his head in as a male nurse and the closest thing to comic relief comes from Mariah Carey’s attempt at a Jewish accent.

The star is Gabourey Sidibe who completely outshines everyone as Precious in her cinematic debut. This young girl can’t read or write and struggles with her ABCs but her inner monologue is poetry and her daydreams are brought to life in bright colourful sequences that interrupt the dark and almost grainy cinematography of her real life.

If I had to sum up this movie in one word it would be ‘abuse’. Luckily, I don’t have to sum it up in one word. Precious shows how civil neglect and paternal abuse can completely stunt a person’s development and create a mental white noise that can prevent a person from functioning.

This is a genuinely shocking and harrowing tale. Audiences may have become desensitised to physical violence, but very few will be able to watch the emotional violence of this movie without being effected.

This is not a date movie. It’s an experience. It will only make you feel good by giving you the knowledge that you have engaged with some real life, hard issues instead of going to fluffy romcom. Precious does finish the movie with a smile on her face but this is not a flick for the faint of heart.