For a movie that has Oprah Winfrey as executive producer to have a quote from Oprah Winfrey on the poster praising that very same movie strikes me as slightly odd. Oprah Winfrey is also mentioned by name in one scene.
And why should a movie with the subject matter of Precious, about an illiterate 16-year-old girl living in Harlem in 1987 who is abused by her mother and has had two children by her father, feature cameos from two A-lister musicians, Mariah Carey and Lenny Kravitz? Despite their fine performances, there was simply no need to cast them. At the screening at the Watershed that I attended last night, there was whispering when they appeared on screen, thus detracting from this powerful movie.
Precious: Based on the Novel Push by Sapphire (to give it its full title) is certainly powerful. It is raw and emotional, giving an insight into a ghastly world of poverty, violence and incest that Clarissa Precious Jones has to literally fight her way out of.
Newcomer Gabourey Sidibe as Precious and American comedienne Mo’Nique as her chain-smoking mother Mary are both fantastic, with Mo’Nique in particular creating an absolute monster, who makes the lives of Precious and her children a misery and then hoodwinks social services that they live a happy life.
Precious longs to be free and dreams of signing autographs on the red carpet and singing in front of an adoring crowd. She is at her happiest at a school for children who have fallen behind in their studies, where she is taken under the wing of the glamorous Miss Rain, who is everything that Precious is not: beautiful, intelligent and thin.
Precious’ acute obeseness is curiously overlooked in the movie, another of its flaws. And when she is in the class with Miss Rain, her fellow students are cartoon-like caricatures of American teenagers from the 1980s, rather diluting the gritty realism elsewhere.
This is a movie that has been talked about in reverential tones, maybe because critics are not keen to speak badly of something that deals with such difficult topics not normally seen dramatised on the big screen. It certainly succeeds in opening up a a door to a brutal world, but its light touches and the try-and-you-shall-overcome theme so favoured by Oprah left me disappointed.
