The Details

Precious

Gabourey Sidibe, Mo’Nique, Paula Patton.

Directed by Lee Daniels.

Rated R. Opens Friday.

Beyond the Weekly

IMDb: Precious

Rotten Tomatoes: Precious

Audiences love to see characters triumph over adversity, and the folks who made the inexplicable indie hit (and Sundance prizewinner) Precious: Based on the Novel ‘Push’ by Sapphire have a uniquely savvy business plan: amp up the adversity until it becomes positively grotesque. Poor black teen? Commonplace. Let’s also make Precious (newcomer Sidibe) maybe 200 pounds overweight. And parental neglect always goes over big, so we’ll give her a real Gorgon of a mom (Mo’Nique): lazy, abusive, prone to yelling things like “I should have aborted your dumb ass!” in her timorous daughter’s face. But that’s not all! You also get a girl who’s been raped and molested by her father since the age of three, and who is now, at 16, pregnant with her second child by him! (Hey, should we give the first kid Down syndrome? YEAH! Badass.) And what else? Oh, I know, I know. AIDS. If there’s a momentary lull in the misery, Precious can turn out to be HIV-positive. If she can stand tall after enduring all of that—thanks to the help of a devoted teacher (Patton) and a caring welfare counselor (Mariah Carey)—then there’s hope for everybody in this crazy mixed-up world.

Not having read the novel Push by Sapphire (who apparently had the clout to insist that her name be in the title), I can’t say whether its internal monologue, which is reportedly very stream-of-illiterate-consciousness, somehow manages to transform this cheap catalog of ghetto horror into something genuinely affecting. Onscreen, however, despite the sincere efforts of everyone involved—Mo’Nique, in particular, turns her big climactic monologue into a showstopping aria of visceral self-pity—Precious seems merely opportunistic and crass, a garish freak show intermittently leavened by banal you-go-girl uplift. It doesn’t help that director Lee Daniels proves equally bombastic with his camera, pointlessly sending it whizzing over someone just sitting in a chair as if to announce that he’s the new Scorsese. All in all, I’d call this film the worst mainstream indie phenomenon since Crash. Watch it win the Oscar.