Liking the Movie "Precious" Makes A Person Less Moral

Precious has Oprah's fingerprints all over it (she's the executive producer), so it might be sort of moot to critique it. After all, it's not made for my demographic and people will like it regardless of dissenting opinion. Recently, though, Oprah's had some good picks in her book club like Franzen's The Corrections and McCarthy's The Road. These are actual pieces of literature. Maybe this film is more like those books, less like The Secret. Maybe Precious is a film, not her usual self-help schlock. Maybe the TIFF viewers did right by giving it the People's Choice award. I'm just kidding. Precious is crap.

Precious (Gabby Sidibe) is an overweight, illiterate inner-city teenager. She wishes for a life of glamour, but she's limited to a life with her physically and emotionally abusive mother Mary (Mo'Nique). Worst of all, Precious is pregnant for the second time, both pregnancies resulting from sexual abuse perpetrated by her own father. She seems to catch a break, though, when she enrolls in an alternative school. With the help of a teacher named Ms. Rain (Paula Patton), Precious turns her life around. She learns how to read and write, she meets some friends, and she escapes from her mother's grasp.

There are a couple elements that give the film's first two-thirds a compelling, fairy-tale feel. There's director Lee Daniels's expressionistic brushstrokes. When Precious looks through her photo album, for instance, the photos talk to her. A picture of one of her male teachers proposes marriage and a home in Connecticut. Then there's the acting. Mo'Nique proves she's more method actor than ComicView regular as she spits venom that could only come from some dark place. Mariah Carey disappears into a flat-haired, caucasian social worker with a heavy New York accent. Sidibe is pretty heartbreaking as the daydreaming, otherwise ordinary girl who's capable of more than cooking pig's feet for her crazy mom. If the film stayed a young girl's escapist fantasy out of a terrible life, the way the protagonist in Pan's Labyrinth transforms Fascist Spain into Alice in Wonderland, this could have been a legitimately good movie.
 
Instead, it professes to be a social game-changer. Artists, and in this specific case I use the term loosely, tread dangerously when they make moral claims about their work. Tyler Perry, the film's other celebrity producer, explains about the movie: "For anyone who has endured this kind of situation, me being one of those people, it left me with hope." What people does he mean, though? People with Precious's problems, people who are illiterate, HIV-infected (don't ask), incest survivors? Whoever Perry means, his statement makes it so that the character Precious can only be a caricature that makes light of real-life victims.
 
Take the incest device. The film does not do justice to real-life incest survivors. Grief-counciling and psychiatry? Precious don't need that. All she needs to heal, apparently, is a pretty teacher and a creative writing class. Actually, she doesn't even need to heal. There is no sense that the sexual abuse damaged her character, left any scratches on her soul. She's a good mother incapable of any real wrongdoing. Her own mother swings a cast iron pan at her and calls her useless, yet miraculously, Precious only has the capacity for good. Of the sexual abuse itself, there's never a sense of gravity. We never see the conditions, social and personal, that allowed for the abuse. We never get to see the face of the abuser. The crime is explained through some stylish, quick cut flashbacks and a couple of two-minute monologues at the wefare office.
 
This is a bit of a digression, but there is this one other scene that I found disconcerting. It has Mary holding Precious's first child, a toddler with Down Syndrome, during a visit from a social worker. After the visit, Mary pushes the child away and starts cussing out her daft behavior. In real life, this child actor seems to actually have Down Syndrome. Isn't it a bit fucked up, a bit exploitative, that this afflicted kid is being sworn at for the sake of a movie? Is Oprah that conniving that kids with developmental problems need to bow down. Oh, and here's how the character Precious talks about the kid: "I call her Little Mongo, short for mongoloid."
 
Generally, I hate talking about movies in terms of morals. A movie, to me, should only be good or bad artistically. However, the filmmakers and marketers are bringing it into that other sphere. They're going to be shoving value judgments down the throats of their prime demographic, a demographic that's not the most mindful or worldly. So, it's in this sphere where the movie needs to be discussed. Oprah says: "When I finished watching that movie, I literally had to breathe. I didn't cry until the card came up, with "For Precious Girls Everywhere," and I recognized myself in that character, and most of all I recognized that I have seen the Precious girls of the world, and they have been invisible to me. The message of that movie is that none of us who sees the film can now walk through the world and allow the Preciouses of the world to be invisible to us again." Yeah, Oprah, you see them. Obviously makes it that much easier for you to make money off them.