Precious
I don’t know what to make of Precious. It shouldn’t have worked for me — I expected it not to work for me — and yet, somehow, it did. Despite Precious’s situation being so bleak and so intense that it should have either rung false or shut me down, it got me to go along with it. Despite Mary having exactly one very loud, marrow-frequency note for 90 percent of the film, Mo’Nique kills it. Despite a voice-over that often brings to mind soggy, no-caps confessional poetry, Lee Daniels creates an atmosphere that carries it.
Gabourey Sidibe is outstanding. She has a unique charisma — a gravity, outside of her size or the way she’s styled from scene to scene; you can feel her thinking, mulling, but you don’t necessarily know the thoughts, or even the topic. At one point, the VO is delivered in a rueful half-chuckle, and you seldom hear that.
What can it win? It will not win Best Picture or Best Director; the latter is kind of a shame, because Daniels’s balancing act with the material is very impressive. I don’t think it takes Adapted Screenplay, either, but that category is weird this year: it’s up against a dog’s-breakfast slate of An Education, District 9, In The Loop, and Up In The Air, so it’s not impossible.
But Mo’Nique: dang. Unabashed, feral misery, and then hand over hand she pulls it back around so that you pity Mary a little. For sheer, hardcore commitment, she’s got it in the bag.
Whether you’d like the movie itself, I really can’t say. It’s both over-praised and over-backlashed; in the middle, though, there is a story that tries too hard, tries to do too much, stumbles over its own timelines, and occasionally makes magic next to its mistakes if you give it a chance.
Death Race 41, Sarah 17; 6 out of 24 categories completed
Tags: Gabourey Sidibe Lee Daniels Mo'Nique movies Oscars 2010 Death Race
I admit I rolled my eyes a bit when the whole AIDS thing came along, thinking “Why don’t you just have lightning strike her and get it over with?” But Sidibe and Mo’nique really just sold the hell out of it, used the money to buy it back, and sold it again.
And I don’t know if it was nominated, but Best Set Design is in the bag if it was. That apartment was a character in and of itself–no longer a physical set of rooms but a den of layered, dank, beige and gray misery. You could smell how the past was just piled all over every surface.
When I was watching this, I thought its fantasy sequences were so miscalculated as to be embarrassing. After the movie had settled, I accepted them a little better as part of the whole. Someone in Precious’s situation might dream of walking the red carpet and being in videos and winning awards, but of course, her real triumphs are going to be on a much more modest scale, like getting her reading level up from from third grade to eighth grade, and taking a year to do that. Besides just living, and not going crazy. It’s an uneven movie, and the director has a better one on him. He could have dropped a couple of those “Look, Ma, editing!” food/molestation/etc. montages.
Loved the rapport between the girls in the class; loved Sherri Shepherd as Cornrows (and I agree with her about Barfly) and Nurse Lenny Kravitz. Thought Ms. Rain was impossibly idealized and broad, although Precious’s “They talk like TV channels I don’t watch,” re: Ms. Rain and her partner, may have been the best line in the thing.
I know you can’t keep making these comparisons, because they rarely stand up to each other, but the book, Push, defines “harrowing.” I’m just relieved to see that it made it to screen in translation.
It did approach soap opera at times, and the fantasy sequences were awkwardly directed (even though the rationale for them was certainly sound), but the movie did work for me. Even Mariah Carey was good.
@Sean: I JUST NOW realized that was Mariah. She even had a little mustache! Good for her.
I’m so glad Lee Daniels at least got nominated for Best Director. Getting such great performances out of people who either hadn’t acted professionally before or weren’t known for being good actors is amazing. And having see several interviews with Gabourey Sidibe and knowing how unlike Precious she is, her talent is stunning. I hope she has good long career.
@Sarah D. Bunting The craziest thing about Carey’s casting is that she was the second choice for the role. The first choice — HELEN MIRREN — had to pull out at the last second because she got another (paying) job. So now I assume MC will be the conventional go-to when Mirren is unavailable.
The fantasy sequences were right on. To me they rang incredibly true, because they weren’t so much about Precious’s daydreams as they were about her dissociating from the abuse while it was happening to her. My partner is a sex abuse survivor and she tells me those sequences were scarily accurate.
I agree with Joey. I just finished watching Precious for the first time, and I think the dream sequences worked. I thought I’d hate them because they were so over the top, but like Joey said, it was about her getting away from the abuse…getting into her own head. Thank god she had an imagination or she would have gone insane for sure.