Precious arrives heralded by voices of acclaim, not raised in celebration but weirdly lowered: hushed in awe, correctness and respect, as if entering a shrine or a sickroom or the intensive care unit of a maternity ward.
Set in 1987, Precious is about an obese, taciturn African-American teenager of that name who has had two babies, the result of being repeatedly raped by her father. One of these children has Down’s syndrome and Precious calls him Mongo, short for “Mongoloid” — that discredited term Precious uncomprehendingly overheard and liked.
Her mother, Mary, the rapist’s partner, takes out her self-hate in repeated spasms of grotesquely jealous rage against Precious, routinely subjecting her to violent assaults and screaming abuse: “You’re a dummy, bitch! You will never know shit, don’t nobody want you, don’t nobody need you! You done fucked around and fucked my motherfuckin’ man and had two motherfuckin’ children; one of them was a god-damned animal runnin’ around lookin’ crazy as a motherfucker … I shoulda aborted your ass!”
Even when Precious begins to overcome this abuse through special education classes — in which she has been enrolled by a sharp-eyed teacher who has spotted her talent for mathematics — and even found a measure of articulacy through burgeoning happiness and self-esteem, she receives news of a terrible new burden of woe in the movie’s final act.
Undoubtedly, the heartfelt lead performance from newcomer Gabourey Sidibe is a powerful spectacle. Her mother is well played by the comedian Mo’Nique, who creates a monster of cruelty and sadism and has a chillingly comic moment when the welfare inspector comes round to her apartment and she must transform herself into a husky-voiced paragon of caring respectability.
Paula Patton plays Precious’s unfeasibly beautiful and caring teacher in the special class and Mariah Carey has a no-make-up and bling-free role, playing Precious’s grumpy, sceptical social worker.
The most important figure is, however, the one who never appears on camera: executive producer Oprah Winfrey, to whose movie debut this film appears to allude, not all that subtly, when Precious’s teacher asks the class what its favourite colours are: her own is purple. There are motivational posters all over the place, urging commitment and self-belief and we get a glimpse of one featuring Winfrey herself, on the importance of reading.
Winfrey’s subliminal brand identity was not, however, the drawback. What I found disconcerting was the extreme shift of tone between the extravagantly nightmarish and the inspirationally upbeat. The horrendous unending nightmare of abuse that Precious suffers, made somehow worse by her agonisingly poignant daydreams of red-carpet celebrity, suddenly gives way to easier-going and even faintly sitcom-ish class scenes with a pre-packaged cast of unthreatening kids in the new school, tricked out with all manner of picturesque street-cred mannerisms. What with the accents, the legwarmers and the yearning for success in the music industry, the film it suddenly resembles is Fame.–