Hey, it’s Mutual Oscarbation, our awards season feature in which Benjamin Sutton and Henry Stewart crawl out of their Netflix envelope-insulated dens and find out during what sorts of movies Academy members are receiving alternative educations. This week they steal a bucket of fried chicken and sneak into Lee Daniels’ Precious: Based on the Novel ‘Push’ by Sapphire.
HENRY:
So, Ben, I think characters like those portrayed in Precious: Based on the Novel ‘Push’ by Sapphire really exist. But Daniels’ movie takes advantage of that fact. Because no one involved with the movie seems to have started with the idea of real characters. They started with stereotypes, pushed them to absurd extremes (until they became grotesque), and shot their stories with a handheld camera on location to make them “real”.
If you want me to believe Precious’ story, Ben, you better find a real Precious and make a documentary. Because otherwise the movie is one of the most jaw-dropping exercises in manipulation ever produced: about a black, overweight, illiterate teen mom with a Down Syndrome baby fathered by her own father, pregnant with another child of incestuous rape, kicked out of school, poor, with a monster mom who also sexually abuses her. By the time it’s revealed (spoiler? Not really) that she’s also HIV+ I spontaneously muttered “oh for Fuck’s sake.” Literally, I can’t imagine another albatross Daniels and screenwriter Geoffrey Fletcher could hang around their heroine’s neck. OK, I get it, her life is the hardest life you can have. Uncle! Uncle!
Oh wait, drug addiction!
But Precious can’t be addicted to drugs because that would imply a flaw in her moral character. Precious has been fucked over every which way through no fault of her own. (Homeboys even shove her into a pile of leaves!) How does she respond? She perseveres, quietly. (Very quietly; the naturally boisterous Gabourey Sidibe, who makes her debut as the title character, mumbles her way through an adroitly guarded performance.) That’s what makes her ultimate redemption (well, this is one of the most ambivalent happy endings of recent memory) so ostensibly Powerful.
It’s easy to see why Tyler Perry signed on to this movie as an executive producer while it traveled the festival circuit; his critic-proof bank-busters have a strange dual politics that Precious: Based on the Novel ‘Push’ by Sapphire borrows: a call for personal responsibility that also recognizes the need for a social support system. It takes a village, Ben. I guess those two ideas aren’t mutually exclusive; that’s just what I’ve learned from polarizing cable news programs. Anyway, it’s emerging as the New Politics of the black middle-to-upper class: people of color need to stick together. But they also need to take care of themselves. (Because Precious’ horrible, horrible mother is a welfare abuser, the movie also strikes me as an argument for Clintonian welfare reform.) Precious is like Madea Goes to Harlem Hell.
And it’s a very sensationalist trip to hell, Ben, didn’t you think? Flashing back to Precious getting raped by her father, closing up on his sweaty body, letting us hear him whisper lines like, “Daddy loves you” were totally unnecessary. Does anybody watching not understand how horrific getting raped by your father is? That they have to see, hear and taste it, too? And Mo’Nique’s heralded, award-winning performance was pretty sensationalist, too. I would hesitate to call it a great performance (but you know me, I’m not big on those Big Performances that win Oscars); she has that one great scene at the end, and a few other really well-performed scenes throughout, but that sudden turnaround at the end—“I’m not so bad! Feel a little bad for me!”—is totally unconvincing because she hasn’t played the character with a glimmer of complexity. Her performance is all monster, the nastiness turned up to 11.
But, honestly, I was expecting Precious: Based on the Novel ‘Push’ by Sapphire to be a lot worse. For all the narrative manipulations, it laid off the formal kind for a while—it took a full hour before I noticed any melodramatic strings on the soundtrack. And I loved how beautifully the film was shot (by cinematographer Andrew Dunn, also behind the camera in Gosford Park), especially the Harlem exteriors. Daniels and Dunn (they should release a country album!) elicit a tangible sense of gritty place, as dirty and ruinous as Sidney Lumet wrung from East Harlem in The Pawnbroker almost 50 years ago. It certainly doesn’t look like Bill Clinton’s ‘hood. But Daniels seems to think that because he’s got some grit cred he can slyly slip into an inspirational teacher movie and no one will notice. You know what perfectly describes Precious: Based on the Novel ‘Push’ by Sapphire, Ben? “Frumpy Mariah Carey”. Because like the dressed-down, unglamorized singer who shows up as a social worker, the movie follows a pretty standard Hollywood formula—it just isn’t wearing any make-up. In fact, it put on a few black eyes.
BEN:
Oh Henry, do you really think that people like Precious don’t exist? Or, at least, didn’t exist in 1987 East Harlem? Or that we’d even be discussing this movie as a potential Oscar-winner if it were a documentary? (Incidentally, the doc Very Young Girls is disturbingly similar and similarly disturbing, all the more so for taking place in 2008 rather than pre-Giuliani, pre-Clinton Harlem.) While I understand where you’re coming from with this “why does Precious have to be so morally unassailable and unrelentingly victimized?” plea, I’d like to remind you that this is a melodrama, a genre that specializes in social types taken to stylized extremes. And maybe it’s because, like you, I was expecting something much less earnest and infinitely more preachy—in one of our iChat discussions before seeing the film I believe I likened it to that most irksome Oscar-baiter extraordinaire Crash—but I was anticipating being much more irritated and clumsily manipulated by this film. Given all the horrible things (which you did a nice, exhaustive job compiling, thank you) that happen to and around Precious, I actually enjoyed this film. Admitting that feels almost perverse, like I’m some Peeping Tom who gets off on abject poverty, but actually has a lot to do with how Precious segues into an inspirational teacher movie. And the soundtrack of soul and golden age hip-hop helped a great deal.
The dynamic between Precious, the other Each One Teach One students and Mrs. Rain (the delightful Paula Patton) may be predictable in its cautious progression from enmity to mutual love and support, but it’s the way that it functions as an almost too perfect foil to the monstrous mother’s lair that I found most engaging. Whenever Daniels took us to the sun-filled alternative school, and later to Precious’ hospital room or Mrs. Rain and her partner’s house, I was constantly terrified that a sudden cut would transport us back to Mo’Nique’s dank den of incest, abuse and grease. This ability to evoke fear without even being in the scene, kind of like the shark in Jaws, made me appreciate Mo’Nique’s performance a lot more even though, as you point out, her character is pretty much pure evil and irredeemable despite the amazing final scene’s attempt to humanize her. She also reminded me of another wrecking ball of a mother: Nicole Kidman in Noah Baumbach’s Margot at the Wedding. The ever-present threat of Mo’Nique’s return made the growing camaraderie between the young women feel all the more like a refuge for viewers too, drawing us into Precious’ predicament where the preceding barrage of abuse and depravity nearly numbs us.
Aside from this comfortably familiar plot of salvation via education, we should probably mention Precious’ portrayal of food, obesity and body image, no? With all the close-ups of boiling pigs’ feet, sizzling bacon, recurring sounds of fizzing grease (most notably during the rape flashbacks) and, of course, Precious’s theft of a bucket of fried chicken, Daniels and Sapphire really rub our noses in the most stereotypical menu of African American foods. That poached poultry is comfort food in the most literal sense, a means of empowerment and control for a young woman who has none in her home life. As with the pigs’ feet that Mo’Nique forces her daughter to eat in a torturous scene, Precious makes knowingly cruel use of racist stereotypes—which, you know, Oscar voters love, and have loved for a long time.
In fact, all of the food metaphors—food as armor; food as weapon; food as a symbol of intimacy; food as a token of love that a male nurse played by an unglamorized Lenny Kravitz grows in his backyard—reminded me of another Oprah-approved black artist’s work: Toni Morrison. Not that I want to elevate Precious to quite such a high standard of cultural artifact, but I think that Sapphire, Daniels and Morrison are all very self-consciously engaging with historically loaded narratives, not in order to exploit them for sensationalism, or paper over their very rough edges, but to give us a slightly more well-rounded understanding of how they continue to affect peoples’ lives. Put another way, I think that the critical backlash against Precious has been so vicious in part because the film doesn’t treat racial stereotypes comfortably or preciously, yet to its credit, it manages not to succumb to the thinly veiled bigotry of things like Crash. And that makes me worry that it might actually be too intelligent to win any Oscars.
Categories Baited: Best Picture, Best Director (Lee Daniels), Best Actress (Gabourey Sidibe), Best Supporting Actress (Mo’Nique), Best Adapted Screenplay (Geoffrey Fletcher), Best Cinematography (Andrew Dunn).