My previous post, Impressions Based on the Hype for the Movie Precious Based on the Novel Push by Sapphire, was an account of exactly that -- how even limited exposure to advance word for the movie over 11 months, from Sundance in January to theatrical release in November, created expectations that made me not want to see it. What follows are my impressions when I finally did.
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UPDATE (12/24/09): "I didn't have the sensibilities of your ordinary filmmaker, let alone your ordinary African-American filmmaker. My heroes were John Waters, Pedro Almodóvar, and actors that were part of that world. Different."
-- Lee Daniels, June 2009
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None of us is immune to movie publicity, unless we're lucky enough to see the picture well in advance of its theatrical release (perhaps at an early film festival screening) -- or stay away from publications, television, radio, the Internet and any form of communication with other people until we can see it. In the case of "Precious Based on the Novel Push by Sapphire," I reluctantly came to feel that I knew all-too-well what to expect: a grueling torture-fest of a movie that would culminate in an equally manipulative upbeat ending.
Turns out, it is all that, but it's also something else I hadn't anticipated: funny. Yes, it's a rags-to-redemption "social problem" movie, but at the same time it's a consciously camped-up fairy tale, complete with Evil StepMother. It's a showcase for two heartfelt bravura performances (by Mo'Nique and Gabourey Sidibe) and an often laughably overwrought melodrama -- not just because of the horrors it depicts but because it's fully aware of how shockingly high it stacks the decks against its heroine. "Precious" is a virtual remake of John Waters' 1974 "Female Trouble," which makes for a crazy, volatile clash of tones and textures.
What director Lee Daniels has done (quite deliberately, it appears) is take Dawn Davenport, the larger-than-life delinquent played by Divine, as a source of inspiration for Precious's tantrum-throwing, cha-cha heels-wearing mama Mary (Mo'Nique). Then he tosses in a beautiful light-skinned lipstick lesbian fairy godmother (Ms. Rain, played by Paula Patton), some cheesy escapist glamour-fantasy sequences (featuring a handsome boyfriend character the credits identify as "Tom Cruise"), and a comical all-girl chorus of wise-cracking GED English students who are assigned to write fairy tales. (Correction: One of the girls is a transsexual/transvestite, but it was unclear to me which direction she's going at this particular moment in her life.) Daniels' directorial sensibility is more garish and flamboyant than Waters' (this isn't kitchen-sink melodrama; it's everything plus the kitchen sink melodrama), but he displays a similar affection for his oversized female characters. Whatever its other ostensible subjects, this is a movie about drag queens acting out.
I mean no disrespect to the serious aspects of the picture -- and certainly not to real victims of child abuse. I'm not saying that "Precious" plays only as a broad black-comedy, or that I spent most of my time laughing with or at it. It contains some pretty harrowing stuff, but the humor does sometimes keep it from being unbearable to watch. Still, the cartoonish glimpse of 300-pound mama (giving Divine's Babs Johnson from "Pink Flamingos" a run for her money in the quest for title of Filthiest Person in the World) waddling down the hall in her slip, awkwardly carrying a bulky portable television set, is appallingly, gasp-out-loud funny. You know neither Precious nor the baby, at the bottom of the stairwell, is in any real danger from this desperately klutzy maneuver -- it's the drop that counts -- and it's played for slapstick shock-laughter. As is the eat-your-hairy-pigfoot scene, just one of the film's indulgences in grotesque gross-out comedy.
We get a laugh near the beginning when Precious nearly beats the crap out of a mouthy male student in a class taught by a math teacher on whom she has a crush. (He later comes alive in a photo album and flirts with her, in a scene borrowed from Gus Van Sant's "My Own Private Idaho.") Precious, though a victim, is no helpless wallflower -- but, like Dawn Davenport's daughter in "Female Trouble," her bullying mother has convinced her that she's intellectually retarded. Later, mama throws on a wig and a floral-print outfit for an interview with the welfare lady (this is 1987) and struggles to control Precious's first incest baby (a Down's Syndrome child), which she uses as a prop. (Seen anything like that recently?) It's a pure Waters scene, with mama dressing herself up and talking nice and sweet to get her money, all the while barely repressing her rage (though not for long) at the innocent child she can't control. Tragedy played as farce.
There's even an outlandish scene in which Precious and mom, who learned her manners from Jerry Springer and usually has the TV tuned to game shows, sit down to watch Vittorio De Sica's 1960 "Two Women" -- in black-and-white, in Italian, with English subtitles. (This is the same girl who will say of a conversation between two bourgeois lesbians: "They talk like a TV channel I don't even watch.") Precious then imagines her way into the movie, with mother speaking abusive language in subtitled, incongruously tender Italian: "Eat you whore."
When Precious shows up at her alternative school with her new baby, wrapped in a bloody blanket, one of the girls finds it contagiously hilarious, especially when everybody realizes the blood isn't the baby's -- just Precious's. Like Tyler Perry's Madea movies (or, say, the swaggering Southern tragi-comedy "Steel Magnolias"), "Precious Based on the Novel Push By Sapphire" has the broad, caricaturish sensibility of a drag show. That's not necessarily a compliment or a criticism, just the vibe I get from the movie. (And if they're not mounting parodies of "Precious" in West Hollywood bars already, they soon will be.)
After I saw "Precious," I caught an online DP/30 video interview director Daniels did with David Poland at The Hot Blog. He talked about the way he worked with his actors, and recalled shouting out ever-more-outrageous insults for villainess Mo'Nique to hurl at Gabby Sidibe, causing them to crack up at the craziness of it all. Their delight in pushing themselves to get as nasty as they want to be (and even nastier) definitely comes through the screen:
"[Mo'Nique] goes, 'You bitch!' I say, 'Nah, call her a fat bitch.' 'You fat bitch!' 'Nah, call her a 'fat black bitch.' So, at this point, Gabby's at the top of the stairs, hysterical... Mo'Nique has to stop because it becomes... hysterical: 'This woman's crazy, and Lee, you're making her crazier with each new word you tell me to say!' And Mo'Nique is a comedian...."
On the serious side, "Precious" avoids the risk of getting too serious. The movie is more successful at comedy than at pathos because everything stays right on the surface -- spelled out in narration, dialogue, and plotting. Presenting Precious's parents as freak-show monsters is about as deep and dark as it gets. (Spoilers follow until the "Be Black, Baby" paragraph.) Except for a few brief, impressionistic flashbacks, the movie doesn't dare dig into Precious's emotional past -- her feelings toward her pedophile/rapist father, or what the dynamics of the household were like, between rapes, when he was living there.
Mother Mary delivers a dramatic speech (we know it's a performance -- whether what she says is true or not) about how her husband molested their young daughter while they were all together in bed and he was sucking milk from her teat, even though she'd long since stopped breastfeeding the girl -- her man kept her milk coming -- and she was jealous of the baby for stealing her lover. So, that's effed up no matter how you slice it. Yet she defiantly (seriocomically) maintains that nobody should judge her. Precious, however, certainly does. And the counselor, Mrs. Weiss (Mariah Carey), definitely does, exiting the scene as though she's about to vomit. (Don't blame her.) And the movie absolutely sure as hell does. Mary is rightly condemned to movie-hell (non-existence), when Precious tells Mary she won't be seeing them anymore. It's meant to be a breakthrough. Precious walks out, the newly self-realized teenager carrying her babies into the street for a speciously triumphant finale as she marches off to... what? It's a good place to end the story.
The movie's strategy, from the beginning, is to dump one or two sensational bombshells on us at a time, usually in the form of revelatory expositional dialog: Meet Precious, an obese and inarticulate black girl who lives in poverty with her mother in Harlem. Precious is illiterate. And her mom berates her, throws objects at her and kicks her. And she once had a child by her father, who raped her. And that child, now being raised by a grandmother, has Down's Syndrome and they call her Mongo (as in "mongoloid"). Oh, and she's currently pregnant with a second child by her father. And did we mention that the father has AIDS? And Precious is HIV-positive, too? And...
Sapphire says she based her novel on memories of people in Harlem in the 1980s. All of them, apparently. This is one hell of a composite character. Throwing everything into one story -- even if each individual thing is based in reality -- does not necessarily make for a tale, even a fairy tale, that works as drama. Better as comedy.
The one thing that genuinely troubles me about "Precious Based on the Novel Push by Sapphire" (and, yes, I love using the proper title, just as I long have with "The Decline of Western Civilization II: The Metal Years") is not that some people have taken it seriously (it's serious and funny), but that they have taken it literally.
Flashback: "Be Black, Baby" is a satirical black-and-white documentary for National Intellectual Television that's plunked down into the middle of De Palma's 1970 "Hi Mom!," starring Robert De Niro. The cinema vertité conventions (hand-held camerawork, b&w, naturalistic/improvisational acting, etc.) suck you into an experimental theater production that physically and emotionally abuses members of a mostly suburban, upper-middle-class white audience under the guise of revealing to them "what it's like to be black in America." One white woman, painted in blackface, is raped with a broom handle by whitefaced African-American actors. (This is decades before "Irreversible," and almost as unwatchable.)
The pitch-dark "joke" at the end comes when the cast bids the survivors a cheery goodnight ("Be black, folks!"), and the audience members are interviewed for the cameras. "Wow, Clive Barnes was really right..." "It made you feel what it felt like to be a Negro -- to be black." "It really makes you stop and think. Certainly I've worried about the problems -- you could almost say the sicknesses -- in our society, but ... it was invigorating..."
I fear that "Precious" offers some audiences a similar kind of extreme exposure that makes them feel they've "learned something real," when they've really just been put through a manipulative, melodramatic wringer. At the end of "Be Black, Baby," the actors complain that they don't think their audience has learned a thing. I don't think Daniels and crew are that naive, or that cynical. But I give them credit for their sense of humor.
Here's a more formal review, by Jamie S. Rich at DVD Talk, that articulates many of my own feelings about "Precious Based on the Novel Push by Sapphire" quite well.
33 Comments
Educational as always Jim.
I remember commenting to a friend after the screening that the sense of humor is what surprised me most about it... Possibly what I enjoyed most about it.
As it's stayed in my memory, however, what's stuck with me more isn't the humor and it's certainly not the melodramatic contrivances everybody is talking about -- those seem to come with the territory these days -- but that I just... didn't feel like I got much out of the experience. The two lead performances are, as you say, bravura, the strongest elements of the film. Good for them. The movie held me but never gripped me.
I felt for Precious, yeah. I feel for a lot of people... I didn't feel any more inspired myself. Nor did I feel profoundly moved. It just... was what it was, an afterschool special with, in all areas, higher production values than typical. I'm trying to be thankful for that. I don't understand how people get behind these movies as films of the year. Surely there were more *haunting* films this year...
I guess I should give more credit for humor though because it did strike me and I don't consider myself as having the best sense of humor... Maybe somebody with a keener sense would react even more positively to those aspects of the movie. Maybe I will too if I see it again someday when I'm older and, hopefully, more cheerful.
I'm looking at at the Buster Keaton quote in the upper right hand corner or this website: "Tragedy is a close up, comedy is a long shot."
That's pretty much why "message" movies don't really hit the mark on the "serious" level that people expect them too. If you're trying to talk about a whole class of people, you are zooming out. And you are going to be silly on some level, as in "Crash." It's better to go all the way to self parody and have either a charitable or cynical sense of humor about the whole thing. Either way.
Haven't seen "Precious." Not sure I want to spend a precious (ha, ha) night out doing that. But your review makes me feel more charitable towards it than I might otherwise. The trailers and reviews I've read make it seem like a rather grim march.
HIV, incest, obesity, racism, teenage pregancy, child abuse, ect. etc. . . that's a lot of weight for one movie. It's nice to know that the filmmakers seem to have some perspective on the silliness of the task they've set out for themselves.
JE: I expected to loathe the movie for the reasons I described in the previous post -- the campy humor surprised and somewhat disarmed me. As for the Keaton quote, the way I interpret it he could have been talking about the difference between his comedy and Chaplin's. You move in for the big emotional close-up, out to respect the integrity of space necessary for physical comedy.
I'm just not getting around to seeing "Precious", and this review just scares the heck out of me. It DOES look like a funny movie for all the wrong reasons.
P.S. I know that De Palma doesn't allow audio commentaries on his DVDs; but in case there's some sort of Special Edition for "Hi, Mom!" released any time soon (since the current DVD is upsettingly barren, with the exception of a theatrical trailer), De Palma oughtta let you record a commentary track for the film in case you're interested. After all, you've seen the film in theaters and you've seen the hysterical way audiences react to the "be black, baby" sequence- plus, you've written the best essay ever written on the film. You should shoot De Palma an email and give it a try, Jim!
Watching the movie, which I liked and recommend with a few reservations, it seemed appropriate that Oprah was one of the presenters (I can't speak re: Tyler Perry as I haven't seen his films). It seemed like the most extreme episode of Oprah's show- from many years ago, not today- that never aired, and made into a SUPER melodrama that does go over the top. So over the top, in fact, I can kind of hear M'onique going "MOTHERf***ER! HERE'S THE TOP, BITCH!" It inspired me, but in a way where I thought "well... most people, sans those of real abuse cases, can come out going 'well, my life is certainly better than *that*'"
To me, the ending was one of the most satisfying things about the movie. It can only be a happy ending, by default, with a bittersweet side to it. Precious is doomed. She's a black woman in 1987 with HIV, so if one does take it even somewhat literally, she's dead in one to a few years time. The best that she can achieve is to break away from the poison in her life, which was her mother. I was glad that the movie put up this on-the-surface sheen of kind of 'it's an ending' happiness, since in the back of my mind I just thought "Wow, hope for a long life is gone for her".
PS: Loved the comparison to Waters movies, never thought of it that way (when I think of Waters' movies, i.e. Pink Flamingos, I look at them and see that they've kind of been surpassed, after all these years, by the likes of Jackass and South Park, and sadly their shock value just isn't as potent anymore).
PPS: Main beef - Two Women? WTF?! She can't even read at that point in the movie, what's she doing talkin' Italian and knowing it's about a mother-daughter story?
You pretty much nailed why I disliked Precious in the second paragraph. The deck is stacked so ludicrously high against Precious right from the beginning that not only does it seem to be too much, but there's only one path for the movie to take, redemption, and thus the movie held no surprises for me. I wanted to feel sympathy for Precious and her plight, but too often I felt like I was being manipulated by a screenplay (Lee Daniels' ham handed direction didn't help much). And did we really need another movie about an overweight black woman overcoming adversity? Are there really no other stories to tell in Hollywood? Ugh.
Interesting. I have been trying to reconcile why I love "Observe and Report" so much and found the marketing for "Precious" to be so distasteful. "O&R" is clearly in many ways a "Precious" for white males...in that it lays thick the over-the-top, stereotypical case for the plight of the impotent and frustrated young white male. (If you haven't seen "O&R" then think DeNiro in Taxi Driver or better yet King of Comedy, even though the movie obviously isn't Scorsese)
I had come to the conclusion that this kind of material was better suited for black comedy than inspirational pandering. I had NO idea Precious was a dark comedy or had any comedic elements itself....I may have to look into it now.
I should add that Lee Daniels had the whole (multiethnic yet maybe black majority) audience at the TIFF premiere roaring with laughter as he was speaking to us. As he started speaking he was nervous, which already endeared him to the audience, and then he let out a "Heyyy" (http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=heyyy) and the audience and comedian came to life.
Everybody was gradually excited/dazzled as he announced the all black and cast and writers. He stops to comment: "There's a lot of chocolate out here!" Audience eats it up.
Then he introduced the white producers (who he had sort of made a guilty liberal joke about earlier, talking about how quickly they bought into this "fat black girl" movie he wanted to make and thought nobody would throw out the money for). The producers, Sarah Siegel-Magness and Gary Magness, weren't coming out as he announced them. Awkward moment, audience isn't sure what's up. Daniels: "I guess they're on white people time."
Audience around me felt like they wanted to give that one a standing ovation.
I saw the movie about three days ago, and I had the exact same impressions as you, Jim. As soon as I saw the crummy, all to "unreal", gothic apartment, and the violent cuts to the pot boilers, the food, etc., I knew this film was different from what I expected. The thing is, and this may be a problem of mine, not the movie's fault, that I think he had to go either for a more comedic approach (not necesarilly more explicit, but just more of it) for this to work. I pretty much loathed the film, because the director kind of wants it both ways, and mantaining his story on a "realist" scale most of the time, he loses credibility, and at some point I was even offended by it, since I'm not questioning the possibility of this kind of things to happen. As opposed to Female Trouble or Observe and Report (another good example), Precious (yadayadayada), not only has been marketed as, but ultimately is an uplifting melodrama. And a bad one at that.
Ps. Jim, have you seen Pedro Almodovar's Broken Embraces? Saw it yesterday and kind of blew me away, I don't know if you enjoy his work.
I don't agree 100% with your assessment mainly because I hated this movie, but I do agree with your complaints about the ending (The worst part about this movie).
Everybody keeps talking about how inspirational and uplifting this thing is, but all I kept thinking about was what the hell was she going to do next. She's dead in a year, has two kids to feed, no place to stay, can barely read, can't get a job but it is supposedly hopeful. What a crock!
And I feel like it has fooled everyone. Like everyone sees this and thinks OMG I had no idea, how dramatic and sad.
I envision millions of old ladies faklempt and telling their girlfriends how they have to see this movie while holding back tears and it all feels so false and forced and fake. What's funny about that?
I don't know. Still don't have any interest in seeing this, but I like how if someone wants to knock this film, all they have to do is refer to its "official" title. Don't you want that author's agent?
(On a side note, I was enjoying the original "The Taking of Pelham One Two Three Based on the Novel The Taking of Pelham One Two Three by John Godey" again last night.)
JE, have you seen Daniels's previous film, "Shadowboxer"? It's a terrible, terrible movie--it's "Powder Blue" bad. With only that film to go on, I'd've counted Daniels out of the picture careerwise. I'm shocked to see him now on everyone's A-list for Hollywood directors, as if that atrocious movie--but, yes, campily enjoyable, with hit-woman Helen Mirren having noisy sex with Cuba Gooding and setting up suburban housekeeping with him the drug dealer's moll they were sent to kill and her baby, whose timely birth saved the mom and set the hilariously ridiculous plot in motion--never existed. The memory of "Shadowboxer" has kept me away from from "Precious" till now. But as a John Waters fan, I may rethink that now.
I'm waiting for the Daniels/Cameron collaboration, "Precious: IMAX 3D".
I must say I have never seen more belittling write-ups about a film in oscar contention in years. I wonder why. I could deride UITA for its severely on-the-nose one-liners and out and out banality never mind Clooney's supposed acting but for what, I don't like it so I move on. I think your intention in writing this piece is to make a mockery of the movie and the people involved even though you falsely said you were not trying to be disrespectful You were,that was your angle, you would n't have wrote this if you didn't want the movie to be branded something in particular. I have heard to many people say the trials that are heaped on Precious are unbelievable. Well TO WHO??!!! There are a lot of people in this world whose reality is very near to Precious'. Its disgusting to me that u assume nobody lives this way when I KNOW DIFFERENT. I think ppl should see this movie with an open mind because what uou just read is manipulation...or ignorance, probably both.
just out of curiosity - are there any african americans here agreeing with jim, or hating this film? i just get a vibe of (unintentional) white elitism, what with all the complaining about the melodramatic aspects of the film. having seen it myself, i actually don't think it's melodramatic, any more so than Million Dollar Baby is.
JE: "Million Dollar Baby" is equally unapologetic, big-time melodrama. If you're looking for some African-American reactions, positive and negative, check out most of the critics I quoted in the first post.
I fear that "Precious" offers some audiences a similar kind of extreme exposure that makes them feel they've "learned something real," when they've really just been put through a manipulative, melodramatic wringer.
Jim, I hope you don't take this the wrong way, but I have an observation about some of your film criticisms that I think need to be mentioned. I've noticed a few implications of a paternalistic streak in your reviews in the past, and I think this sentence provides the most explicit example of it. Allow me to explain.
In many movie reviews, you will find the reviewer not evaluating a film on its own terms, but instead evaluating a film based on his own assessment of the film's likely impact on other viewers. The critical reaction to Fight Club offers the most obvious example of this phenomenon. Countless people, even though they themselves did not misinterpret the film, nevertheless criticized the film because they expected that other people might misinterpret it. Even some rather intelligent people suddenly become paternalistic when this type of situation come up. The arrogant, unstated subtext behind such an argument is: "I'm smarter than the vast majority of people, and I'm afraid that all of those idiots out there will not be anywhere near as sophisticated as me, and therefore I'm holding it against the film." Most of the negative reviews of Fight Club hinge upon that type of argument. Another prime example of this phenomenon (and another favorite film of mine) is Oliver Stone's JFK.
Setting aside the hubris (let alone the dubious nature) of these underlying assumptions, I still think this type of argument has absolutely no place in any critical evaluation of a work of art. It's an invalid basis for criticism. The only relevant concerns are the impact of the work of art on one viewer. You shouldn't presume to know what is going on in the minds of other viewers, but even if you did know, it would be an irrelevant factor in your evaluation. No work of art should be deemed better or worse as a result of its (hypothetical or actual) effect on third persons.
Give other people the benefit of the doubt (both the viewers and the artists). They're smarter than you think. Well, that's my philosophy anyway. Paternalistic arguments such as those ones (based on the premise that "I am smart, but other people are stupid and need to be protected from their own stupidity") irritate the hell out of me. If you yourself did not reach any clearly erroneous conclusions from the movie, then there is no need to speculate as to whether other people might reach clearly erroneous conclusions.
Also, just to go on record while I'm airing grievances (it is Festivus, after all), I agree with many people who have commented in the past: the strikeout text gimmick is extraordinarily tacky. You're a good enough writer that you should always be able to find a way to express the same sentiment without resorting to that tactic.
Anyway, keep up the good work.
JE: Thanks for your insights. It's quite true that I can't assume to speak for anyone else. These two posts were written in an unusual context for me -- after I had read some reactions others had to the movie over the last 11 months. So, I was writing specifically about what I'd witnessed, not just speculating. If you follow the link in that sentence you cite, or look at some of the things others have written here and elsewhere, you'll see what I mean -- and why I was reminded of the "Be Black Baby" segment from "Hi Mom!" I regret if I sounded paternalistic, but the audience responses I'm addressing are real.
P.S. The strikeout gimmick here was used simply to make the fairly-tale phrase "Evil Stepmother" an accurate one: "Evil Mother."
I must say, until this review I really had no desire whatsoever to see Precious, having successfully formed my opinion of it without viewing it, like all good critics.
Right.
But the idea of it as some kind of comedy seems intriguing, even though most people seem to take its seriousness as some kind of horrible slice of life that needs to be seen so we can be "edified."
Here's A black perspective from a lay-person, not a member of the commentariat:
I thought, like Jim said, the movie was best when it was playing for comedy rather than "realism"/drama. I felt, as Ebert said about, I believe Transformers 2, there was "too much of a muchness" to the movie. The attempt to do a realistic portrayal via an "everything including the kitchen-sink" approach doesn't really match. And I haven't seen an ending as disconcerting, or at least amorphous, played/directed as obviously inspirational/upbeat since I Am Sam.
The movie I'd most compare it to this year is Mary & Max. It's an animated film from Australia with Philip S. Hoffman as the voice of an old New Yorker who gets a random letter from a bored girl in Australia who finds his name in a phonebook. The cavalcade of horrors visited on the girl from childhood through adulthood from beginning to end just gets to be all a bit too much by the end. No surprise, it's on the Oscar short-list for potential best animated film nominees.
When it comes to movies like Precious, I generally, but not always, defer to the wisdom of Edgar Kennedy in Sullivan's Travels: "The subject is not an interesting one. The poor know all about poverty and only the morbid rich would find the topic glamorous."
But Precious also brings to mind the earlier discussion in that movie between Sullivan and the studio heads when he says he wants a movie (O Brother, Where Art Thou?) about "modern problems" with "stark realism" and they say "yeah, but with a little sex in it" and "how about a nice musical". That's what Precious reminded me of. Trying to do a stark, realistic picture about serious problems, but with a little sex (or, in this case, humor) in it.
Cheeseman, I don't necessarily think there's white elitism going on here although there may be. I'll at least provide you with my perspective.
I'm a white male, but I'm also a film scholar who's been spending his college years examining African American images in film. I don't want to sound paternalistic or snobby, but I expect more from a black filmmaker than Lee Daniels has given me in the past. (Daniels is also queer, which most reviews seem to neglect to mention, although it does raise some interesting questions about the film). When I see a film like this, I'm reminded of films like George Washington, Ballast, Do The Right Thing, and others that provide some connection to the reality of black life and are much richer and more meaningful films because of it. Ignoring some of what Jim said in this post, I think that many of us, white and black alike, went to see a much different film than Daniels provided, and whether or not it was enjoyable or "good" just depends on your perspective. I felt the same way about it as I feel about Tyler Perry films. They certainly fill a niche, and plenty of people are going to love them, and there's nothing wrong with that. But for those of us who are more educated in film, I see a film like this and wonder why it was popular over dozens of other films by black directors that are far superior.
HA! Great headline! Haven't read your article OR seen Precious but have seen Female Trouble and know if you know it well enough to claim this, you're likely on to something!
...and the other comments here are all WAY too long to read. No chance.
Jim, I think the odds Lee Daniels has even heard of, let alone seen "Female Trouble", are a lot larger than you seem to think.
JE: I think not, after watching the Poland interview I linked to above. But I just now Googled "lee daniels john waters" and found this from a June 2009 interview at IFC.com: "I didn't have the sensibilities of your ordinary filmmaker, let alone your ordinary African-American filmmaker. My heroes were John Waters, Pedro Almodóvar, and actors that were part of that world. Different." http://j.mp/6drkt8
"Precious" put me more in mind of Fassbinder's "Chinese Roulette" than Waters' "Female Trouble." I think of Waters, even at his filthiest, as being too optimistic and sunny a filmmaker to get lumped in with the more dour visions of Fassbinder and now Daniels.
I know a lot of people would say that "Precious" is a more "upbeat" movie than "Chinese Roulette," and it is, but it's still a pretty mean-spirited affair despite the positive characters in the film (which actually outnumber the negative ones.)
"Precious" does offer a way out (not from a cruel fate, but from abject misery) that Fassbinder's film doesn't and shouldn't, but I still feel they share something in common. I would need to see "Chinese Roulette" again before elaborating.
"My heroes were John Waters, Pedro Almodóvar, and actors that were part of that world. Different."
Color me genuinely surprised! Now, oddly enough, I'm all the more curious to see the movie -- although mostly to see whether Lee put enough distance between himself and his influences...
JE: Whatever you think of "Precious," it's clear that the sensibility is rooted in the comedy/melodrama you also find in Waters and Almodovar. I didn't know that before I saw the film but, watching it, it's as obvious as can be. It's still a prevalent form of racism that stereotypes a filmmaker by his/her race, disregarding any other aspects of his/her artistic personality.
Regarding your last two exchanges with Serdar, now I am genuinely confused.
is this to say that perhaps the larger audience (the mainstream media, as well as Oprah and TP) have it all wrong? that the film really is, and was intended to be, more along the lines of camp, but they adopted it more as an oscar-bait, verite-style, message-film?
or, if the film had toiled in obscurity, would you have had a different reaction, and possibly accepted it and approved of it more, in the vein of Waters?
FYI, i havent seen the film yet. i ask these questions as a continuation of the debate you've been having recently regarding the film's hype (along with your breakdowns of Avatar, TDK, and NCFOM, another perfect example of why i love what you do here).
i feel like i have been more continuously fascinated by the debate on this site than i may ever be by the movie. and that comes from an equal love of reading film criticism as well as watching the actual film (something it seems some of your more defensive readers don't understand).
JE: Thanks, Marrrk. I think the film is intended to be (as I said) both serious and funny -- not exclusively one or the other, but from what I've read most people seem to be taking it as a straight-ahead message picture, while detractors have seen it as ludicrous/risible bad taste. I can't say I know for sure what the ratio between intentional and unintentional humor is, just that the tone in the examples I described strongly reminded me of John Waters. When I wrote this I didn't know Daniels considered Waters and Almodovar his cinematic heroes, but that sure makes sense once you've seen the movie.
I believe the problem is that Jim, et al, are falsely insisting that "proponents" of Precious believe it's a "straight-ahead message picture" -- when I don't believe it was a "message picture" at all, whatever that means.
I maintain it was simply a character study, a slice of life, whatever you want to call it. Don't blame the film if some audiences trumpeted it in such a way that makes you dismiss it as merely pandering to liberal sympathies.
I was just looking back at some of the commentary around last year's Oscar nominees and I have to say this reaction tracks strongly with your reaction to one of last year's big dramas; not, as some suggested, Slumdog Millionaire, rather John Patrick Shanley's Doubt.
Don't believe me? See for yourself:
"I'm not saying that "Precious" plays only as a broad black-comedy, or that I spent most of my time laughing with or at it. It contains some pretty harrowing stuff, but the humor does sometimes keep it from being unbearable to watch."
""Doubt" may be a work that touches on Serious Issues (sex abuse in the church, the evils of gossip, the weighing of greater and lesser sins, the obligations of that come with intuition and experience -- and the paradoxes of doubt) but it's also by the guy who wrote "Moonstruck" and "Joe vs. the Volcano."....I don't think "Doubt" is successful, but it could have been intolerable if it didn't provide laughs."
Jim, I've just spent an evening with Precious..., and your phrase "Everything Including the Kitchen Sink" hasn't yet stopped ringing in my ears. It's pretty easy to see why, even though Daniels cites Waters and Almodovar as influences, that the movie is so easily taken as a straight-up social melodrama-- the piling of problems onto Precious and the fever-pitched gothic/tragic aspects of the scenes between her and her mother are genuinely over-the-top (Margaret White seems like a model of restrain in comparison), yet Daniels is as wobbly as a two-legged stool when it comes to stoytelling and imagemaking. He hasn't the fire in his belly to make the grotesque juxtapositions he traffics in here leap off the screen as anything but literal-minded concessions to an audience who wants to have a good wallow and feel better about themselves at the end. He may aspire to the high camp of these directors, but I don't think the movie is even as funny as you suggest it is-- it just struck me as flat and obvious, full of characters as types, exaggerated horrors, rather than people, and punctuated by obvious, lead-footed fantasy sequences. And I will say that I thought both Gabby Sidibe and Mo'Nique were exceptionally good. But it has to be some kind of blot on a director that such raw performances, in touch as they were with specific pain, still could not bring me emotionally into their world.
Mostly I appreciate your bringing "Be Black, Baby" into the conversation. What I sensed as the movie began to inch closer to release and the hype began in earnest, especially as I saw the reactions to what David Edelstein wrote, was that Precious was being positioned as a movie about "a," if not "the," black experience that, because of its brutality and because it bore the imprimatur of Oprah Winfrey and Tyler Perry, demanded to be taken seriously-- that to fail to do so was to reveal someting ugly about the viewer. I was prepared for it to become the social problem picture version of The Dark Knight, and woe befall anyone who didn't buy it, pig's feet and all. I don't think that has quite happened-- the debate over its merits has been, for the most part, more thoughtful that the crudities and threats fanboys dumped all over anyone who didn't like the Batman movie. But still, that upbeat ending, the one where this unfortunate of all unfortunates stumbles out into the world with renewed aspirations, is a real corker. Is she really going to be okay, what with the laundry list of obstacles and the odds stacked no less against her than at the beginning (by forces less sensationlistic than sexual, physical and emotional abuse, which is maybe why we don't get to see them more directly addressed-- too messy and complicated)? She is if we need to stumble out of the theater with anything close to lightness in our step, feeling as though we've been changed, affected, enlightened, truly moved or disturbed. The best movies that affect us this way (say, Killer of Sheep, or A Serious Man) can do so in a milieu of ethnicity but without suggesting we should be congratulated for having learned something about what it is to be African-American or Jewish. These are stories that feature characters whose ethnicity is clearly central to their experience but may be only be part of the whole picture that the audience takes away.
I'm looking forward to thinking more about Precious, and despite the suspicions of some here I value your attempt to try to contextualize this movie as something other than what is apparently represented by the two extremes of reaction to it. If we're to think about what we see on the screen, as opposed to what we're told is there, then Precious presents an interesting opportunity. That gulf between what the movie was hyped as being and what it actually is accounts for a lot of the hesitance beforehand and indifference after seeing it that has been expressed here. Certainly the movie deals with horror, but it wasn't even close to the harrowing experience I expected, and its camp tendencies didn't elevate the situation either. I'm fully aware that tragedies like those depicted in Precious take place every day. But there's a difference between simply depicting that knowledge and unifying it with something other than morbid fascination.
I notice that with films you want to attack, like Precious or Antichrist, you avoid outright criticisms, but try to undermine the films, like patronizing it with the label of "comedy." It's pretty obvious what you're doing.
JE: I would hope so. But I find nothing patronizing about the label of "comedy."
This is pretty brilliant. I buy the argument and am tempted, when awards season dies down, to watch Female Trouble and Precious back to back. I don't see this as some attempt to undermine a film for some crazy agenda; rather, it's an interesting avenue of comparison to better understand a very compelling film. Well done.
I love that you connected "Precious" with "Female Trouble" - it's the first thing I thought when I walked out of this trainwreck of a movie! People were walking out beside me talking about how groundbreaking and transformative it was...while I laughed and recounted how it was one birdcage short of a "nice girls don't wear cha cha heels"!
Jim: I think you're correct that there is more intentional humor (via camp) here than the movie has been given credit for. Perhaps that oversight is due to the way the horrors smother the comedy. Or perhaps some critics who feel this is, and must be, a "message" movie simply can't reconcile that the two can be both simultaneously -- which isn't to say that I think Precious is successful in that respect. (Somewhere above, someone mentioned Million Dollar Baby, and I remember how few critics said a word about the camp of the final act. Easier to avoid it than to confront it, I guess, particularly if confronting it might require being less than praiseworthy of Clint Eastwood. But I digress. Where was I?)
I think Mo'Nique's performance is tremendous because it is both terrifying and wholly camp. That works. Alas, the moment in this film that made me want to laugh was the one in which Precious finds out she has HIV. The situation wasn't funny. But I thought it was truly hilarious -- in a pathetic sort of way -- that the film needed to continue piling the tragedies upon Precious, as if she hadn't suffered enough already. I suspect, however, that if I had laughed out loud I would have gotten The Look from everyone around me, who would have thought my reaction in poor taste.
Your reaction here reminds me of your take on Fight Club as hilarious. If the fans of the film were forced to laugh in all the places that you do, I wonder how many fans would be left? (Note: I don't pretend to know the answer. Nor do I mean to imply that you are misreading either film, or that there can be only one reading. Just noting that your reading is different from the norm.)
I leave wondering what Daniels thinks of the reaction to his film. If someone were to walk up to him and say, "I loved Precious; it's hilarious!" would he take offense? Or is he sitting around wondering why his film is picking up award nominations as a drama instead of as a comedy?
Thanks, Jim! I can't believe I didn't see the comparisons before. At least Lee Daniels didn't try to write a song himself and have one of his stars sing it (I truly adore the opening song of "Female Trouble").
i love the movie precious it somehow reminds me of the way life was for me
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