Precious: Based on the Novel Push by Sapphire

And push it does. Approximately as subtle as that dangling deformity of a subtitle, Precious: Based on the Novel Push by Sapphire (if that is yr real name) strains, in fact, like a pair of movers hoisting a grand piano. This shit practically herniates itself. Claireece ‘Precious’ Jones is our heroine, an obese sixteen-year-old girl in pre-Giuliani, oldschool-bleak 80s Harlem, her head shaped like the Hindenburg. What else? Um … she is the illiterate mother to a four-year-old girl w/ the Down syndrome (whom she endearingly calls “Mongo”); she is casually bearing her second child, both her kids fathered by her own father (who has been raping her since she was three); she is physically and psychologically abused by her motormouth mother w/ whom she lives in piss-lit jaundiced haze of television, hatred and pig’s feet; she has just been suspended from junior high and is about to discover that she is H.I.V. positive. That’s right motherfucker! Every couple of minutes you are going to find out that things can indeed get worse for Precious. Goddamn! No wonder she suffers from an insultingly puerile post-traumatic fantasy life full of Entertainment Tonight approved safe places which she enters and then repels from like a Negroid Rapunzel through chasms opened up like birth canals (or crucifix-shaped peepholes) in the flaking scenery whenever the going gets particularly tough. The vulgarized commercial, showbizzz latticework of the adolescent unconscious, w/ its paradisial unfurling of red carpets, the demonstration of designer gowns before the flashing cameras, and, of course, the idealized secular-religious placement of the couple – the fulfillment of the promise of total status ek-stacy in the love bond – placing her eternally internally on the arm of a handsome light-skinned blatino. At one point she even primps in the mirror, a blond, skinny white girl gazing back out. Even her fucking dreams make her pathetic. (The film itself does seem to dream similar dreams out loud: all the “together” black folk in the movie – Lenny Kravitz, Mariah Carey, and Paula Patton – are about as white as black gets (Precious cannot even figure out what Mariah Carey’s social worker in fact is)). This is humiliation melodrama on hyperdrive and, as is generally the case in such self-defeating operations, its ultimate incredulity is to ask us as viewers to find the catharsis and uplift on the other end of this near-comic carnivalesque panoply of wear-down travails (at least its funnier than the Coen Brothers’ recent scattershot Job riff, which is to say not really very fucking funny at all, is it?). The film finally becomes most insulting to itself and us when it grants us license to use it to feel better about ourselves, kind of like we just gave a bum a twenty. The performers truly redeem themselves by putting in their all, though. You’ve never seen so many people in a movie squinting so hard to feel, and never so many inexperienced actors able to dispense that melodrama money shot: the single tear trail down the cheek. But really, when you think about how many people in America actually live lives like that of Claireece ‘Precious’ Jones, how they have to slog miserably courageously through it, never getting noticed, is the feeling that this leaves you w/ a profound feeling of need to see performers redeem themselves? Fuck no, it better not be. Precious did indeed move me at times, I have to admit that. I even caught some of the uplift. The film is far from incompetently made. What can I say? I’m a sucker too. But I don’t feel good about it and I don’t commend the film for pulling off what the source material clearly made inevitable anyway. The only lasting effect that Precious really had on me that I can be happy to keep as an ongoing token of its efforts is that seeing her as a frumped-up social worker without a coterie of beauticians to attend to her, I can now say that I have fallen deeply in love w/ Mariah Carey. Like seriously deep in love. Seriously. Deep. I never thought she was all that pretty. Turns out she’s not all that pretty. She’s, like, fucking beautiful. What can I say? I always find the girls in the before-and-after shampoo adds more attractive before they have the shower, when their hair still won’t do what they want it to. So yah. I guess I grew a little.