Fwd: [fatstudies] Precious- the film based on Push
Moya Bailey
the New York Times has a much longer review:
http://tinyurl.com/yh56nwx
and Colorlines has an additional line of commentary regarding the socioeconomic context of the story:
http://colorlines.com/article.php?ID=632
Lynn Ellen
-- In fatst...@yahoogroups.com, naomi fink <scorpiosistah@...> wrote:
>
> Survivors *By* Stuart
> Klawans<http://www.thenation.com/directory/bios/stuart_klawans>
>
> This article appeared in the November 23, 2009 edition of The Nation.
> <http://www.thenation.com/doc/20091123> November 4, 2009
>
> <http://www.thenation.com/doc/20091123/klawans#text-large>
> [image: Gabourey Sidibe as Claireece "Precious" Jones in <i>Precious</i>
> ANNE MARIE FOX]
>
> ANNE MARIE FOX
> Gabourey Sidibe as Claireece "Precious" Jones in *Precious*
>
> When a filmmaker chooses to title his movie *Precious: Based on the Novel
> "Push" by Sapphire*, you know what qualities not to expect from him:
> concision, reticence, subtlety, allusiveness. You may also anticipate,
> correctly, a lack of excessive self-regard. Before you've even bought your
> ticket, producer-director Lee Daniels has disavowed any claim to have
> thought up his project's sensational premise. I will soon get around to
> praising him for this modesty, and for his film as a whole. First, though, I
> need to deal with the question he's raised about the relationship between
> the movie and its source.
>
> **Like *Push* before it, *Precious* purports to give voice to someone who is
> midway in status between a fictional character and a worst-case scenario: an
> illiterate, battered, obese, welfare-dependent 16-year-old girl in 1980s
> Harlem who at the start of the story is pregnant for the second time by her
> now-missing father. This is someone who can defiantly describe herself (in
> both the novel and the film's voiceover narration) as a loud-talking,
> gluttonous offense to middle-class white society: "Ugly black grease to be
> wipe away." The principal difference between the novel and the movie lies in
> the contrasting modes of irony they use to undo this hellish stereotype
> (which they themselves have called up) and affirm the character's humanity.
> The novel does this work by drawing attention to the gap between Claireece
> Precious Jones's inner world and her painfully limited powers of expression.
> (She is "in the ninfe grade" and has a daughter who "got Down Sinder.") The
> movie draws your attention to the gap between Precious's painfully limited
> circumstances and the extravagant means of expression at Daniels's command.
>
> He does not merely suggest Precious's inner world. He makes it explode in
> full movie color against a jumpin' soundtrack. The dimly lit box of daily
> suffering splinters apart, and Precious, suddenly draped in leopard skin and
> blessed with good hair, will sweep ecstatically onto a red carpet. Or she
> will receive encouraging nods and winks from the animated pictures in her
> photo album; or look in the mirror and see that she's slim, pretty and
> blond; or literally become absorbed in the movie playing on TV--De Sica's *Two
> Women*, if I'm not mistaken--and begin speaking Italian in a black-and-white
> world.
>
> In the novel, Precious describes such imaginative longings in her own words.
> This isn't to say that the author's voice and the narrator's are perfectly
> merged--the disguise is sometimes thin or inconsistent--but the match is
> close enough for novelistic convention. More important, language eventually
> becomes the medium for Precious's growing sense of self-worth--*Push* is the
> story of an education--so that circumstance, fantasy and aspiration are all
> made of one malleable substance. In the film, though, Daniels's set pieces
> split author from character, imagination from reality, in a way that
> cinematic convention does not entirely cover. Yes, these directorial flights
> wring pathos from Precious's pop-culture dreams, which abase her heart even
> while lifting it. But as parodies, they elicit, perhaps unavoidably, a
> slight condescension toward the entertainments of the recent past and the
> people who were suckers for them. As amusements for the audience, they
> remove the viewer temporarily (blessedly) from the overall oppressiveness of
> the character's life. Not least, as vehicles for performance, they give the
> remarkable young actress who plays Precious, Gabourey Sidibe, a few
> much-needed opportunities to show that she is not really this character.
>
> Sidibe is a big woman--perhaps even bigger than the figure you might picture
> to yourself when reading *Push*--and comes onto the screen with the sort of
> shock effect that can be faked but in this case is not. You know the flesh
> is hers; and given the way she inhabits it in the early scenes, you can't
> help wondering whether she also might own the glare, the scowl, the rolling
> gait and the purposeful mumble. (It swallows both rage and shame.) Even if
> Sidibe's behavior is an act, it exposes something vulnerable in a real
> woman. Even if the woman signed on willingly for the exposure, she did so
> with almost as little power over her director as Precious has over the
> world. So the suspicion arises: in helping Daniels dramatize the humiliation
> of Precious, did Sidibe participate in her own?
>
> The answer, delivered in the first fantasy sequence, comes with a mile-wide
> smile, a rolling wave of chin-to-toe dance moves and a note-perfect
> imitation of a starlet chirping into the microphones. Sidibe is rescued from
> the doom of first impressions--and given the way movies work, the character
> is rescued with her, even before the plot gets properly started and Precious
> begins her course of enlightenment in an alternative school.
>
> This isn't to say that the film's pedagogical narrative could have been
> skipped. (If anything, it's almost too important to the movie, which takes
> care to instruct Precious in everything a well-intentioned audience would
> want her to learn, from the alphabet to tolerance toward lesbians.) Nor does
> the revelation of Sidibe's many-sidedness relieve the character from having
> to endure a singularly constricted life. (Although I've said a lot about the
> imaginative breaks in the film, your strongest memory might be of a gloomy,
> uterine apartment, lit solely by the TV set, where Precious is always within
> her mother's striking distance.) Reality grinds on, and grinds down, in *
> Precious*; and yet there's always a degree of play--in the sense of slack,
> as well as make-believe--in the way Sidibe both inhabits the character and
> escapes from her.
>
> I think everything that's most admirable about *Precious* can be summed up
> in Daniels's treatment of Sidibe: how he keeps her safe and intact within a
> fully committed performance. This is more than kindness toward a novice who
> took on a risky role. It's part of a pattern in Daniels's approach, and
> evidence of his paradoxical modesty.
>
> For a filmmaker with an excellent Rolodex and a taste for lurid subject
> matter--think of his producing *Monster's Ball* and recruiting Halle Berry
> for the lead--Daniels has a way of undoing his own flashiness by casting
> against the grain. In *Precious*, he chose a comedian, Mo'Nique, to play the
> vile, violent, horrendously damaged mother; a rock star, Lenny Kravitz, to
> be a sweetly patient maternity nurse (the only decent man in the film, and
> the only one with a real speaking part); and an international sex symbol,
> Mariah Carey (the shining tresses hidden beneath a shaggy dark wig, the
> renowned bosom dowdily concealed), to be the crusty welfare caseworker whose
> ethnicity is a puzzle to Precious. All of them are implicitly more than the
> roles they portray; but none of them venture even a single wink at the
> audience. So the celebrities are rendered unobtrusive, while the newcomer
> (the only one who gets to break character) is elevated to the level of the
> stars.
>
> It takes humility for a director to stand back and let the endless
> possibilities of human character assert themselves; just as it takes
> humility to locate the heart of a novel and translate it from twisted,
> uncertain words into gestures, expressions and tones of voice. That's why,
> however much of Lee Daniels I see in this movie, I see more of the cast, the
> city, the period, the conditions. That's why, despite my chronic suspicion
> of social-realist freak shows and tales to inspire moral uplift, I recognize
> something I can trust in *Precious*.
>
> Besides, it's devastating
>