NYFF – One of the problems with being an incredibly cynical person – someone suspicious of just about anything, especially those things involving earnest social concern, major issues of class and race addressed in a populist manner, Mariah Carey, Oprah Winfrey, Tyler Perry, and a whole lot of money – is that one finds oneself laughing at the most inappropriate things. And upon sitting down to watch Precious: Based on the Novel ‘Push’ by Sapphire, already wary of the neverending title, I was rather worried that I would be immediately betray myself as that smug shit guffawing indecorously at a corny, slice-of-life melodrama about a 300-lb. African-American teenager from a deeply impoverished background who is bearing her second child by her father, and is occasionally beaten over the head with a frying pan by her mother (who is played by Mo’Nique).
There are, to be sure, a few WTF-inspiring moments: a credit sequence written in illiterate scrawl (and translated into the Queen’s in stately Times New Roman) that, yes, includes the names Mimi, Oprah, Tyler, and Lenny Kravitz (!); the fact that Precious’ first child has Downs Syndrome and is literally named Mongo; disquisitions from Precious on the moral character of “homos” and from her pimply- and hairy-faced mother on how “cold pigs’ feet is nasty as shit”; the subtlety-free litany of urban blights piled one on top of the other. But I was surprised at how infrequently I laughed: not only was there enough unvarnished brutality to effectively shut me up, but also there were lots of unfunny things still joked about either explicitly or implicitly (yes, even the incest). Director Lee Daniels constantly shifts the tone of his movie, often by interjecting fantasy sequences: many of which are awful, but credible enough for their character, while others are the filmmaker’s own whims, like one based on a De Sica film. In any case, the film so nimbly leaps from a familiarly stylized sense of gritty realism to full-on melodramatic camp that it never sinks into the bathos one is anticipating. Nor does it beat that old “The More You Know” drum of sanctimonious uplift too hard—after all, the title-character’s situation has only the slenderest of silver linings.
Ultimately, in spite of what I was anticipating, I couldn’t help but admire Daniels’ gall. After all, Hollywood message picture clichés notwithstanding, it’s not every day you see a movie about a poor 300-lb. black girl. But more importantly, this film could really give a shit about my reaction, whether it’s admiration or smug, derisive laughter. Daniels knows who his audience is, and it’s not me. But he has an enormous faith in that audience’s ability to roll with his outlandish, bombastic, brutalizing punches, and the canniness to pull most of them off.
I should also note that Mo’Nique, Mariah, Lenny Kravitz, and especially newcomer Gabby Sidibe are all really, really good in the movie.
Part of the the 47th New York Film Festival
by Leo Goldsmith | Source: Lionsgate 35mm Print
05 Oct 2009 7:57 PM | Comments (5)
I did not think there was any way a person could reasonably discuss this movie with humor, but you did it. Congratulations.
Why are you not the audience for this movie?
That’s a rather tricky question, and since I wrote this, many more people have had a chance to weigh in on and complicate the question of who this film was intended for.
While I think most would assume that Lee Daniels has a largely (though not uniformly) African-American audience in mind, there are those who argue that in fact a white critic like myself is precisely this film’s audience, that this film actually has nothing to say to black audiences at all, but is really a way of reifying stereotypes and reinforcing a sense of white superiority. This is Armond White’s argument, though for coherence, I much prefer Ed Gonzalez’s review in Slant, where he calls the film “one for the Stuff White People Like canon.” I don’t wholly agree with this notion, but I think it’s a very useful corrective, and to be fair, they’re at least partly right: the film owes much of its profile and probable awards-season success to the way it both anticipates and dumbfounds the reactions of film critics and industry people, the vast majority of whom are white. Its premiere at Sundance and allusions to De Sica are enough to indicate that Lee Daniels has such an audience at least partly in mind with his film.
That sort of film is exactly what I was expecting Precious to be, and I have no doubt that some audiences will react as White and Gonzalez fear. But I don’t think, as White explicitly charges, that Daniels’ only aim is to reiterate racist caricatures in order to make a quick buck for himself and Oprah, and to help white people feel superior. I’m sure he has at least some kind of black audience in mind, and when White says that the film “might have been met [with] howls of skeptical laughter at Harlem’s Magic Johnson theater,” I wonder if this wasn’t Daniels’ intention all along. Is it possible that Daniels is using these stereotypes, this horribly shocking material, in a knowing way? Is it possible that he’s making some deliberately warped, campily excessive melodrama of a message picture? I actually think David Edelstein – who hates the film – inadvertently has it right when he likens Precious to John Waters’ work. Pink Flamingoes, Female Trouble, and Desperate Living use extremes of shock and deliberate bad taste to carve out and empower a very specific audience, to separate the narrow-minded bourgeois from those he really meant to address: the politically and socially marginalized.
Of course, this movie has its problems and I truly have no idea what Lee Daniels’ intentions for his film or his audience truly are. If, however, Daniels’ intentions are as I describe them, it seems to me that he’s crediting the audience’s intelligence far more than most films do. Perhaps, on the contrary, the film is far dumber and more simplistic, but I don’t believe our thinking about it should be.
I’ve been reading a lot about this film on various sites, and this may be the first in which it is discussed as a film, and within the context of film, rather than as a purely social statement. I think it’s best to remind ourselves that Precious, or any film that touches on so many difficult issues, is first a work of art, and the personal expression of one or a few people, before we start analyzing it as a social corrective or as a “message.” Kudos.
I was hoping your review would tell me if this movie was offensive or even racist. Do you think that with time we’ll have annother “Birth of a Nation” on our hands. This story seems to be be pushing a message or something; Opera seems to be implying that it’s a women’s liberation type thing. I don’t buy that; but can I call it “annother indi-film shocker!”? sorry for all the questions. one more. no.
Marianne
13 November 2009
11:55 PM
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