This is the first of two posts about the movie "Precious Based on the Novel Push by Sapphire." In this one, I talk about the impressions I got from the movie's press coverage, advertising, reviews and word-of-mouth, and why they put me off the film. In the second part I'll write about my response to the movie when I finally, reluctantly, went to see it... (Part II: "Precious Based on the Movie Female Trouble by John Waters")
I put it off as long as I could. For months I tried not to read about it, but I knew it had won a bunch of awards at Sundance back in January, 2009, when it was called "Push." That, in itself, is enough to make me want to avoid it. The Sundance Film Festival is notorious for hailing a certain type of dilettantish formula movie -- the feel-bad/feel-good story of degradation and redemption, set in a colorful, semi-exotic subculture -- and the picture eventually known as "Precious Based on the Novel Push by Sapphire" sure seemed to fit the profile. There's nothing I hate more than a voyeuristic lesson-movie that goes slumming and then presents itself as an inspirational triumph of the spirit. By the time Oprah (Winfrey, that is -- promoter of bogus New Age twaddle like "The Secret") and Tyler Perry (maker of amateurish chitlin' circuit teleplays) signed on, with great fanfare, as "presenters" I was beginning to think (as I used to tell my newspaper editors about movies I was fairly or unfairly predisposed to despise) that nobody had enough money to pay me to see this thing.
For the longest time I avoided the reviews, too -- until October when a friend e-mailed me Ed Gonzales's scathing pan at Slant, and the hilarious phrase "your tongue hasn't clucked this much since 'Crash'" leapt out at me. It seemed to confirm my first impressions. And, no, I'm not going to pretend I'm immune to advertising, press coverage and word-of-mouth any more than anybody else is. The best I can do is to limit my exposure, but "Precious" rolled out over months -- first on the film festival circuit (and it played them all), then in limited release, a few cities at a time. By the time it got to my town, Seattle, in mid- to late-November, I'd broken down and read some of the most extreme praise and condemnation the movie had elicited. Here are a few comments I came across that stood out for me as the most provocative:
...Daniels emphasizes only the worst in human nature, and does so in a way that flatters rather than confronts the prejudices (and fetishes) of his liberal audience.
One for the Stuff White People Like canon, "Precious: Based on the Novel Push by Sapphire" is an impeccably acted piece of trash--an exploitation film that shamelessly strokes its audience's sense of righteous indignation.
David Edelstein, New York Magazine:
There are worst-case scenarios, and then there is Precious, who's in a hellish league of her own. The heroine and narrator of the novel Push by Sapphire (born Ramona Lofton), now a much-hyped film called "Precious: Based on the Novel Push by Sapphire," is the embodiment of everything--I mean, everything--American society values least and victimizes most. She's a poor, illiterate, morbidly obese, dark-skinned African-American girl. She was raped by her father from the age of 3, pregnant with his child at 12 (the baby, which she names Mongo, has severe Down syndrome), and then pregnant by him again at 16, when the novel begins. She's also sexually molested by her jealous, welfare-cheating, gross, and sedentary mother, although the genital fingering might seem preferable to the verbal and physical abuse. The book gives you quite a bludgeoning. I started to pull back from it in a flashback when the 12-year-old girl is in labor on the kitchen floor and her mother is kicking her in the face.
Precious is not an easy movie to watch, and there are people in the black community who wish that you wouldn't. They insist that it is yet another stereotypical, demonizing representation of black people. The other camp, however, is thrilled to see a depiction of a young African-American woman that, while heartbreaking, is a portrait of the black experience that has been overlooked on the sunny horizon that stretches from "The Cosby Show" to "House of Payne." Unfortunately, both of those reactions miss the movie's most searing message.[...]
I'm tired of movies presenting black people as grateful to find a helping hand to rise above their abusers. Not because we've seen this movie before -- starring Sidney Poitier, Michelle Pfeiffer, Hilary Swank, Morgan Freeman, and even Matthew Perry -- but because the story never changes.
Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times:
Precious has shut down. She avoids looking at people, she hardly ever speaks, she's nearly illiterate. Inside her lives a great hurt, and also her child, conceived in a rape. She is fat. Her clothes are too tight. School is an ordeal of mocking cruelty. Home is worse. Her mother, defeated by life, takes it out on her daughter. After Precious is raped by her father, her mother, is angry not at the man, but at the child for "stealing" him. [...]
That is the starting point for "Precious," a great American film that somehow finds an authentic way to move from these beginnings to an inspiring ending.
Not since "The Birth of a Nation" has a mainstream movie demeaned the idea of black American life as much as "Precious." Full of brazenly racist clichés (Precious steals and eats an entire bucket of fried chicken), it is a sociological horror show. Offering racist hysteria masquerading as social sensitivity, it's been acclaimed on the international festival circuit that usually disdains movies about black Americans as somehow inartistic and unworthy.
The hype for "Precious" indicates a culture-wide willingness to accept particular ethnic stereotypes as a way of maintaining status quo film values. Excellent recent films with black themes--"Next Day Air," "Cadillac Records," "Meet Dave," "Norbit," "Little Man," "Akeelah and the Bee," "First Sunday," "The Ladykillers," "Marci X," "Palindromes," "Mr. 3000," even back to the great "Beloved" (also produced by Oprah)--have been ignored by the mainstream media and serious film culture while this carnival of black degradation gets celebrated. It's a strange combination of liberal guilt and condescension.
Europeans, notably Belgium's Dardenne brothers, have told versions of this story, more soberly and observationally. Realism, though, isn't quite right for the grotesquerie and comedy here.... The movie wants to go a little bit nuts, which is what happens whenever the comedian-actress Mo'Nique is on screen. Her stage act specialized in raunchy self-empowerment. Her movie work, specifically her tour de force in 2006's "Phat Girlz,'' has been about self-destructiveness. Her "Precious'' performance feels as much about spiritual exorcism as acting. It all culminates in a grand emotional breakdown that not even roadside assistance could do anything about. [Note: This review's verdict on the film is unquestionably positive.]
There is something almost reckless about this filmmaker's eclecticism, which extends from the casting -- pop stars and television personalities alongside trained and untrained actors -- to the visual textures and the soundtrack music. "Precious" is a hybrid, a mash-up that might have been ungainly, but that manages to be graceful instead. It's partly a bootstrap drama of resilience and redemption, complete with a hardworking teacher (Paula Patton) wrangling a classroom full of disadvantaged girls. It's also the nearly Gothic story of a child tormented by the cruelty of adults, as lurid as a Victorian potboiler or a modern-day tell-all memoir.
Above all "Precious" is unabashedly populist in its potent emotional appeal...
To Blacks, Precious is 'Demeaned' or 'Angelic' by Felicia R. Lee, New York Times:
"With Michelle, Sasha and Malia and Obama in the White House and in the post-'Cosby Show' era, people can't say these are the only images out there," Sapphire said. "Black people are able to say 'Precious' represents some of our children, but some of our children go to Yale."
"Child abuse is not black," she added. "What do you call the man in Austria who imprisoned his daughter for years?" [...]
"Precious" puts a much-needed spotlight on the underclass, said Nathan McCall, a novelist and former newspaper reporter who teaches a course on the history of African-American images at Emory University. But, he added, Lee Daniels, the film's director, could have avoided some stereotypes by not making light-complexioned actors the good guys or showing Precious eating a bucket of chicken, he said.
"A white artist can make a film about a family of 10 drug addicts, and the public sees it as a film about a family of 10 drug addicts, not 10 white drug addicts," Mr. McCall said. "A black artist can make that film, too, but you have to be aware of the history."
Eventually, the day before I actually saw "Precious Based on the Novel Push by Sapphire," I came upon a conversation at The Awl in which Kia Matthews said:
Well. I didn't even want to see it. The trailer made me cry, so, I wasn't really looking forward to a full length version of that. It looked like that emotional porn? You know, downtrodden person going through trails, tribulations, strife, set to uplifting music and/or a gospel song, etc. [...]
Part of my reluctance to see it was that it looked extremely manipulative. On the one hand you have the story of a poor black fat woman in the ghetto. Which is like, YES WE KNOW IT IS DIFFICULT. On the other hand you can't NOT tell these kinds of stories because it's real and it happens more than anyone not living it could imagine. But it was different than I expected, I can say that.
I can now say that, too -- though I admit none of the things I heard or read about the movie in advance compelled me to want to see it. It was only after posting this parody video, "Precious Moments," along with a disclaimer that I hadn't seen the movie myself and was dreading the prospect, that I finally forced myself to confront my fear that the movie would be as sleazy and opportunistic as it looked. ("Precious Moments" is uncannily accurate, as it turns out -- not always in the ways I anticipated.) In my next post I'll write about the "Precious" I saw in this context, and how the movie both confirmed and confounded the expectations I'd failed to avoid forming over the year...
(Part II: "Precious Based on the Movie Female Trouble by John Waters")
23 Comments
Jim... you just made my day (in your last sentence especially). Thank you for doing this, look forward to reading.
I recently blogged about my thoughts on the film after you posted "Precious Moments" which is hilarious and, I agree, is so spot on, so many levels... (which I only realized upon seeing the spoof though had sensed it emotionally/subconsciously... just didn't know how to word it yet, needed the inspiration from the video). Kia's come closest to my conflicted feelings on it.
And, as I read over these thoughts, I'm a little encouraged to see how many are touching on things that I thought maybe only I picked up on, primarily that this movie is a *very* Gothic story and the movie underplays that. Throw some white actors in and, because we're more familiar with them in Gothic stories of child abuse ("Fire Walk With Me" being my Holy Grail as far as that subject is concerned), suddenly we realize how deeply horrific this story is, horrific in how it's not just terribly sad but terribly, grotesquely hilarious too. (Wesley Morris' opening lines seem to pick up on it.)
How much inspiration can we take away from any story where a mother lets her husband molest her baby daughter because she's lonely herself and that's the level of thinking she's limited to? I know there are institutional reasons for this, I do feel for her as a soul, but as a mind this woman really is a monster. Why must movies always take us down to the lowest of low in society to *move* us? If you're gonna go there, go all the way, don't let the audience off easy with an upbeat way out.
At the end of the movie, Precious is indeed "gonna be alright" as Oprah has said in interviews. Yeah, *she* is, as a strong, smart human being. But her situation is still F'd right up as far as I'm concerned. And I felt like the movie glosses that over, even after its clever moments of contrasting the harsh realities of Precious' life with moronic game shows that are signs of society's ignorance and moral bankruptcy. That to me is the movie's strongest moment. The performances are, also, forces to be reckoned with and they help give the movie some emotional weight. But this movie just doesn't cut through the crap the way Ramin Bahrani's or Ryan Fleck's films do. I felt too much like I was, indeed, seeing a message movie. I don't want that. I just want people. There. Alive. Trying. Period. All the rest is over thinking and/or over feeling it.
So that's what rubbed me the wrong way in "Precious". There seems to be a range of offenses and defenses from person to person... I'll be curious to know what Mr. Emerson walked away with as "For Precious Girls Everywhere" glittered and everybody cheered and went home happy. (At the premiere at TIFF anyway, big celeb event, lots of people screaming "Mariah! Mariah!")
I did feel for the characters, it is an emotional experience about a story we don't see often. I personally believe it to be a more than above average film, much better than "Slumdog Millionaire" and a movie that will stir up feelings in audiences. Feelings of dismay that we live in a world where this can happen, much like "Antichrist."
What I hope audiences aren't feeling is: "How inspiring that I'm not her! That I have so many more luxuries and therefore should be happy I just have this. How inspiring that her life sucks so much but she's gonna get through it!" To me, that is sick, backwards logic on at least three counts. The bottom line is mankind has to some point do something about Precious's situation. She doesn't even have what I would consider basic rights everybody should be entitled to. You can't write/cry/smile/hustle/push/wish that fact away no more than you can AIDS.
(Sorry if this is a repost, not sure if original went through, possibly too long?)
You're braver than I, sir. As someone who works with kids like Precious, I refuse to see this film because all of my fears about false hopes and phony social awareness seemed to come true when I started hearing about the film and its content thanks to the press blitz a few months ago (it really was hard to avoid this movie wasn't it?). I'm of the belief that you can't really make a film like this that people want to see because in my experiences 90% of the time it ends badly for these kids. Getting them to understand how to go to school and interact with a community is something to be celebrated...but that doesn't make for interesting drama.
Precious is going to do for lazy social workers what Dead Poets Society did for lazy English teachers. Ugh. I look forward to your thoughts, Jim.
Hate to seem nit-picky, but Slant.com and Slantmagazine.com are two totally different places.
Hi Jim, I'm definitely interested in seeing the second part of your thoughts on the film. I have to say that this genre of film in mainstream cinema is the worst kind because it sensationalizes poverty which needs no sensationalizing. Poverty is complex in its conflict between individual accountability and systemic deficiencies and yet films like Precious never rise above one dimensional characters and superficial melodrama.
Take the ridiculous melodrama in Precious for instance; Precious is a teenage mother of two (one of which has down syndrome) who is sexually abused by both her parents, physically and emotionally abused by her mother, illiterate, and obese. Her mother is the epitome of a stereotype in that she is a lazy welfare mom who does nothing except collect a welfare check and abuse her daughter while also exploiting her grandchild named "Mongo" for an extra check. Then add on that no one is Precious' life is willing to help her including teachers at her old school, social workers, principals, or family until her new light-skinned teacher is willing to rescue her. Then, in a wondrous flurry Precious is able to learn to read, stand up to her mother, take her children, and go out on her own.
The film totally glosses over the complex nature of abuse and poverty. The mother is cruel but she is also a victim of abuse and poverty herself and yet she is mostly portrayed in this movie as a heartless monster who is too lazy to do anything except collect a check. This stereotype of lazy welfare moms nicknamed "welfare queens" by President Reagan in the 80s was later proven to be inaccurate because welfare was too little to sustain a family. Incredible that a film produced by Oprah and Tyler Perry can be so superficial in its view of poverty and abuse that it peddles antiquated stereotypes and a sensational fairy tale while doing nothing but providing another cliched rags to riches story.
LOL! The title pun was waiting to be done. Glad to see Armond White in there. He makes too much sense to be left out
But where is it? Where is part two?? I can't take the suspense!
This isn't one of you unresolved endings is it?
Yeah, I have no interest in seeing this one for the reasons cited.
Sincere congratulations Jim, without even knowing what your verdict is on "Precious": you've both been honest and forthright about your (extremely strong!) prejudices against the movie before seeing it, while avoiding the pitfall of letting those prejudices blind you to what you are actually seeing (whether or not what you actually see is better or worse than what you imagined is irrelevant...the fact is it is bound to be different). That's criticism, and honesty, at its finest.
It seems to me that this is a terrible case of letting the cart get before the horse. I watched Precious with limited awareness of the media storm around it because it looked compelling and Ebert recommended it. I liked it for its performances, I disliked it for its over-the-top nature.
But reading the reviewers above, the whole experience gets perverted. Wasn't the novel written by an African-American woman? Wasn't the director, cast, and most of the crew non-white? So, why are we insistent on filtering this through white eyes?
One of my favorite operas is Wozzeck. In it, the hero is exposed to monstrous indiginities beyond comprehension or reality. Is it "true"? No. But it's engaging and it works. The same is true of Precious. Her tragedies are epic, but individually they exist. If it plays like melodrama, I guess it's not for everyone, but it worked for me.
JE: We watch movies through the only eyes we have. Not that race is necessarily some kind of credential, but most of the admirers and critics excerpted above are African-American or otherwise non-white (women and men), too, so I'm not sure I understand what you're saying. A movie can be about anything. The key to whether it "works" or not for a given viewer is in the execution -- in this case, all the details of how those monstrous indignities are revealed and presented on film. Where is the line between truth and phoniness, sympathy and sensationalism, depiction and exploitation? Those are arguments people of many races and background have been hashing out since the novel was published in 1996, and they're the arguments people are having now about the movie. See the NYT piece linked above about the controversy among African-American viewers: "To Blacks, Precious Is ‘Demeaned’ or ‘Angelic’."
Another take on the film by Scott Tobias at AV Club:
http://www.avclub.com/articles/the-year-in-film-2009,36408/3/
“Overrated: Precious
On what planet does this horror show take place? In Lee Daniels’ fraudulent indie drama, noble intentions, two great performances, and a redemptive arc are like the sharp scent of Febreze to cover the most rancid, pernicious racial and urban stereotypes. Every cliché is as supersized as its poor, obese, brutalized teenage heroine, whose 300 pounds bear the weight of AIDS, incest, illiteracy, molestation, welfare, and the various gaps and needless bureaucracies that clog up “the system.” Not to mention the girl’s mother (played by an admittedly inspired Mo’Nique), a stampeding Jerry Springer monster given to form-fitting floral jumpsuits, endless consumption of pig’s feet and daytime television, and hurling glassware and foul epithets in equal measure. This isn’t the poetry of the everyday, in spite of Daniels’ predilection for arty shots of flapping birds and literary quotations; it’s grotesquerie masquerading as truth. “
What's your opinion on some of those Hollywood films from the 1980's that attempt a closer understanding of black culture and do it in a way that is admittedly manipulative? Coppola's "The Cotton Club" (1983)? Spielberg's "The Color Purple" (1985)? I like both films, although they're undoubtedly flawed. Especially "The Color Purple", with which Spielberg has a problem with demonizing the black male figures more than he needs to- the Alice Walker novel is more willing to forgive the Danny Glover character. All the same, I think "The Color Purple", like "The Cotton Club", is a great film precisely BECAUSE it's so flawed. But Spielberg and Coppola also pay loads of attention to detail.
Now, is Lee Daniels that sort of filmmaker? I feel condtradictory for refusing to see "Precious" even when speaking as a fan of those two previous films. But Coppola and Spielberg got their influence from classical filmmakers like Martin Ritt, Mervyn Leroy and the like; where is Lee Daniels getting his influence? Somehow I doubt it's either John Cassavetes or Charles Burnett, even with that radical indepdendent style.
How is she going to be alright at the end of the movie? She is HIV positive and in 1987, before Magic Johnson and cocktails, that was pretty much a death sentence. She is also left with a special needs child. Do you really think the welfare folks would allow an illiterate, HIV positive teenager on her own take care of baby “Mongo?”
Why is everyone only focusing on the story? Lee Daniels’ direction is embarrassing. The artificial light pouring through the windows indicates that Precious lives next door to Chernobyl. Nice cutaway to boiling entrails during the rape scene. Subtle, but effective. And those fantasy sequences look like something out of an Aaron Spelling production. And how is it that an illiterate character sits and watches a subtitled movie? Oh, yeah. Daniels wants to let you know that he’s making a contemporary update of Italian neorealism. Pretentious oaf!
If this goes on to win best picture (and there's a damn good chance that it will)"Precious" will be the most amateurish film ever to pick up a golden doorstop.“Precious” is more of a fantasy film than “Avatar” and “2012” combined.
I don't buy the argument that any of the characters in Precious represent black stereotypes.
We can loosely analogize Mo'Nique's character in the film to a Mommie Dearest type cartoon monster mom. Did anyone scream that this exaggerated take on Joan Crawford she represented a "white stereotype" or even a "rich white celebrity stereotype?"
Just because a character is black doesn't mean that he or she represents blacks. How about her just being a person? There's no doubt the mother character is a grotesque caricature, but there are, in fact, poor people in the world, black or white or otherwise, who choose to live off welfare and watch game shows and abuse their kids. Is it supposed to be completely out of bounds to depict such characters on screen for fear of being accused of stereotyping?
Both of Precious' parents are monstrous, but not every character in the film is. Far from it.
I agree with the point that it's difficult to buy Precious' miracle salvation and her discovery o the most perfect teacher in the universe. For a while, I was afraid she was going to turn out to be another figment of Precious' imagination along with, possibly, the entire class.
It's this aspect of the story that is most potentially troubling, the dangling of a magical rescue (like, say, a poor kid from the slums going on a game show and solving all his problems) for someone like Precious. But considering where the film ends (I won't spoil it here) Precious is hardly facing a bright future.
If Armond White sincerely believes that "Norbit" and "Meet Dave" are "excellent recent films with black themes," he is truly to film critics what Stephen Colbert is to right-wing pundits.
Appreciate the openness on this issue, Jim. I have a feeling this conversation is going to explode once the Oscar nominations are announced (with the expanded field, it's a likely candidate - and I'm putting my money on a Mo'Nique win), so might as well air out these issues now.
In defense of what Samir said above, I think it's a variation of what I was asking in the previous post, about whether it's fair to judge a movie negatively as a "Stuff White People Like" fantasy when none of the main creators are white. It makes for an odd kind of dissonance, having white people dismiss a production by people of color for conforming to what they believe are white stereotypes of black people. Again, that's not to say the issues can't overlap, but that angle of criticism seems strangely, for lack of a better word, racist.
Now, when those criticisms come from within the black community, it's a whole different ball game, and you're right that Daniels is fully aware of it.
As for the film itself, I've been surprised by how neatly some of the critics have tried to interpret the film's ending. In our conversations after the movie, we were most impressed with how the film 1. acknowledged the importance of individual growth and responsibility by the protagonist, 2. also acknowledged that her lessons learned in writing class are not going to save her, and she's got a very difficult road ahead, and 3. hints somewhat sinisterly that she may not be immune to the cycle of abuse begun by her mother. It's neither facile optimism nor pointless degradation, but a fairly sober assessment of where this person would be under these circumstances. Whatever weaknesses the film has (and I'll repeat what I said in a previous post: ugh, those fantasy sequences!), I really wouldn't dock it points for lack of verisimilitude.
Also, I love the fact that Armond White considers it on par with Birth of a Nation. He never fails to deliver!
Excellent recent films with black themes--"Next Day Air," "Cadillac Records," "Meet Dave," "Norbit," "Little Man," "Akeelah and the Bee," "First Sunday," "The Ladykillers," "Marci X," "Palindromes," "Mr. 3000," even back to the great "Beloved" (also produced by Oprah)--have been ignored by the mainstream media and serious film culture.
I love this classic Armond White nonsequitur tactic here, where he throws in a few movies that are critically-panned in a list of great movies, as if everyone agreed with him already. Most reviewers would think that proclaiming Norbit and Little Man as "excellent recent films" would destroy their credibility. I've never seen any of those movies apart from Akeelah and the Bee, which was okay, but steeped in cliches. I'm sure he has his reasons for liking all of them, but I admire his bravado.
Here's another quote from Armond White's review of Star Trek that I loved: This Star Trek sells cuteness, sentimentality and explosive F/X as if Starship Troopers, Minority Report, Mission to Mars or even Blade Runner or The Matrix (all visionary standard-setters) never happened.
I love how he throws in Mission to Mars there. I still have never seen Mission to Mars, but that sentence made me want to see it just to see what he was talking about, despite all of the poor reviews from the super-majority of other critics.
I think you could make an entire glossary of Armond White tactics like these ones. I'm proclaiming this one as the "Popular Opinion Non-Sequitur."
I'm not very interested in the movie, but I am interested in the core ideas underlying this debate.
I think that this was a great point from Christopher Long: I don't buy the argument that any of the characters in Precious represent black stereotypes. We can loosely analogize Mo'Nique's character in the film to a Mommie Dearest type cartoon monster mom. Did anyone scream that this exaggerated take on Joan Crawford she represented a "white stereotype" or even a "rich white celebrity stereotype?" Just because a character is black doesn't mean that he or she represents blacks. How about her just being a person? There's no doubt the mother character is a grotesque caricature, but there are, in fact, poor people in the world, black or white or otherwise, who choose to live off welfare and watch game shows and abuse their kids.
At what point will someone be able to tell a story like Precious without the race card coming into play? We see this same cycle over and over. One person writes a minority character doing something, another person decides that the writer must be trying to make a statement about minorities and accuses the person of racism. In doing so, though, the second person is guilty of racism also, by refusing to see the minority as a human being.
(On a side note, I'm still a defender of Crash, which I believe has been misinterpreted both by its admirers and by its detractors. There are a number of scenes in the film that highlight these type of maddeningly self-perpetuating discussion of race. I think the screenplay is skillful, cynical, and downright hilarious in the way it deconstructs these types of near-paradoxes. Racism is the ultimate Pandora's Box of society; once the box has been opened, things will never go away.)
One of my favorite operas is Wozzeck. In it, the hero is exposed to monstrous indiginities beyond comprehension or reality. Is it "true"? No. But it's engaging and it works. The same is true of Precious. Her tragedies are epic, but individually they exist.
I am reminded of an anecdote about the making of the film Good Night, and Good Luck. The film uses actual footage of Joe McCarthy, mixed in with actors playing Murrow and other characters. Then, test audiences complained that the actor who played McCarthy was overacting. The actor playing McCarthy was McCarthy himself. Even as we condemn movies for 'sensationalizing' suffering from social issues, it's probably also true that someone, somewhere in the world, actually has even worse problems than the characters in the films. Even the most 'unrealistic' and 'exaggerated' depictions of such horrors still might be softening the blows actually felt by real people now and in the past. That's the type of world we live in. For all of the over-the-top cliches in film, there are countless real people in the world who are even more over-the-top.
Just a quick response to Nathanael's post:
You're surprised that a movie produced by Tyler Perry is superficial? Have you ever seen a Tyler Perry movie? They are among the most superficial movies ever made.
I love your honesty Jim. I have avoided seeing it mostly because there are so many other movies that seem more engaging and unpredictable i.e The Hurt Locker, An Education, etc. I hate when movies get over hyped. I don't think critics know how much they ruin a movie when they slap four stars on it and say "Best film of the decade!". That's why I like Michael Phillips (and you of course Jim). He's very honest in his reviews and never hypes a movie too much unless it REALLY deserves it like lets say "A Serious Man" because movies like that are not going to have a big audience. I think that a lot of the hype for "No Country" ruined it for a lot of people.
A lot of the folks posting here just cannot believe such things happen in real life. Unfortunately, I've witnessed first hand near identical horrors as to what is shown in the film. I went to see the film with friends and we had the same sense or horror, shock and -- unfortunately -- recognition. A film that brings to light the ugly topic never discussed -- incest -- is to be commended and I think the film handled this quite realistically esp. in the interaction between Precious and her mother. 15% of sexual assault and rape victims are under age 12. More than 1/3 of the attackers in these case are family members. And these are only the REPORTED cases. Cases like those depicted in the film may seem over the top to many of the posters here, but if you know someone (and you probably do) who has been a victim of incest/child sex abuse it is eerily accurate in many many ways.
While the film is far from perfect and wallows in clichés (patient and kind teacher that shows Precious "the way", warm-hearted nurse that befriends Precious, 180 turn from illiteracy to star student) the criticisms of the film's portrayal of the relationship between Precious and her mother are way way off. One poster asked "On what planet does this horror show take place?" -- that would be earth, where we surely accept casual cruelty, something rawly portrayed in this film, on a daily basis.
JE: You make a good point, which is that whether these things happen is (as Kia Matthews says in the original post) not really open for debate. Unquestionably they happen. The question about the movie is whether you believe them, in the moment, as they are portrayed on the screen. We've all seen "true stories" that defy credulity when they are filmed.
Sean, I hate to dust off this controversial word, but what you're talking about is an issue of privilege: a film that deals with white characters is semantically 'neutral' in American culture, whereas a film that deals primarily with people of color is not. Might as well rail against the sun rising in the east.
It's not avoidable because - and this is just the tip of the racial iceberg - it's partly predetermined by the way the industry operates. Non-white audiences are considered 'niche', and films that deal with non-white characters are risky business propositions because white audiences generally avoid films helmed by predominantly non-white casts. Unfortunately that dynamic operates among the small-scale art circuit films, too.
[Thought experiment for you: imagine you sell investors on a small slice-of-life film that's racially neutral (to the extent that it can be). Then imagine you show up with an all-black cast. Guess what's going to happen to that investment money?]
Can we extricate ourselves as viewers from this kind of context? (after all, watching is different from creating, right?) Well, no, because we do watch films in context, and the lack of films dealing with majority non-white casts means that each one is racially marked by virtue of its existence. Likewise, anyone who directs a film dealing with predominantly non-white characters is aware of both representation and self-representation in a way that white creators don't have to concern themselves with. It's that old 'privilege' word again, but there's a reason that only white people use words like 'colorblind' (mercilessly parodied by Colbert for that very reason.) You can't be 'just a human being' if you are a person of color in this country - except when it's convenient for others.
Now, that's quite a bit different than saying that something like Precious is a statement about THE black experience in America, which is narrow and delimiting. I think everyone would agree with that. But the facts of the film's creation make it impossible to talk about it without discussing race. Nothing wrong with that, either.
So, where's the follow-up post?
JE: Still trying to finish it. All these damn Na'vi keep getting in my way.
Clearly, Jim is saving his "Precious [etc.]" post for Christmas morning, so we all have a present to open!
Leave a comment