Short Take: Uncomprimisingly harsh, which helps make it so inspirational

Director: Lee Daniels (Shadowboxer)

Screenwriters: Geoffrey Fletcher

Cast: Gabourey Sidibe (début), Mo’Nique (Welcome Home, Roscoe Jenkins; Phat Girlz)

Length: 1 hour 50 minutes

Synopsis: Clareece “Precious” Jones is a 16-year-old girl living in 1980’s Harlem.  Still in the eighth grade and pregnant with her second child by her father, she is sent to a special school where she finally learns to read and write and is given the support and confidence she needs to finally escape her physically and emotionally abusive mother.

Analysis: Judging from previews and advertisements for Precious, one would expect it to depict the story’s events with a startling realism.  However, director Lee Daniels takes a different approach.  Though Daniels certainly renders Precious’s life with horrifying detail, the film deals in fantasy as much as it does in realism.  For Precious, and for the film, fantasy is a means of escaping the brutal life she lives.

The first instance of the use of fantasy as a preservation mechanism comes when Precious remembers how she became pregnant with her second child after her father raped her.  Rather than film the scene in all its vicious clarity Daniels instead films it impressionistically, showing only flashes of the memory: a close-up of the father’s hand reaching into his pants, a shot of her mother standing framed in the doorway staring with contempt upon Precious and her father on the bed, and so on.  Though the act is not shown in its entirety, it is no less alarming and still manages to convey the trauma Precious experiences.

Fantasy is not only used to diminish past pain, but that of the present as well.  Precious constantly spares herself, and the audience, the pain of the moment by resorting to an imagined version of events.  Perhaps the most surprising example of this comes when her abusive mother forces her to eat food she finds unsatisfactory for her own consumption.  As Precious eats, she and her mother watch a black-and-white foreign film on television about a poor mother and daughter.  Suddenly, Precious and her mother become the characters and the dialogue about eating the food is carried out again in Italian with subtitles.  However, it seems more an act of love, as if her mother is sacrificing her own hunger for the good of her daughter.  The scene is a perfect example of how Precious idealizes her life in order to escape its sad reality.

The most frequent way in which Precious escapes reality is through fantasies about her future.  The majority of these fantasies concern what she hopes is on her horizon.  In fact, one can argue that this is what the film is about – her struggle to fulfill her dreams.  She must become educated and gain the confidence to separate herself from her mother before she can achieve the happiness she desires.  Her desire to leave the oppression of her current life is signified by two images throughout the film.  The first is the adoring light-skinned boyfriend she hopes to have and the other is her life as a celebrity who walks red carpets and performs before adoring fans.  Precious relies on these images to motivate herself and it is through her desire for the happiness they represent that she is finally able to rise above adversity.

There is a final level upon which fantasy and reality blur in the film, and that is in the actors.  One example is the casting of Mariah Carey as a frumpy social worker.  The audience never forgets that underneath the hairy lip and make-up is a Grammy-winning artist, yet her performance becomes that much more interesting because we know she lives the glamorous life Precious desires.  Mo’Nique’s performance as the abusive mother works on the same level.  The actress’s off-screen persona as a confident comedian only serves to make her performance as a detestable and vicious character even more intriguing.  The actresses’ off-screen personas arguably give the film an entirely different and deeper meaning than it would have had otherwise. On every level, Lee Daniels’s Precious can be looked at as an examination of how reality and fantasy can be manipulated.  Neither one by itself can fully provide the film’s intended meaning, and it is only by juxtaposing and mixing them that it achieves its impact.

Rating: 8.0