Movies that get under my skin can
drive me to books that spawned them: No Country for Old Men, Revolutionary
Road and now Push, a 1996 novel by army brat,
performance poet Sapphire.
On the printed page this overweight
black teenager’s existential wail was uncomfortably close to my younger self’s
fall into the welfare caste system, brutal or distracted parents, weird food
and huge overdoses of the worst kind of TV.
My salvation too would come from school and an unusually
dedicated corps of teachers. I was, of course, not a three hundred and fifty
pound, pregnant, twice by her own dad, teenager.
“My name is Claireece Precious
Jones. I don’t know why I’m telling you that. Guess ‘cause I don’t know how far
I’m gonna go with this story, or whether it’s even a story or why I’m talkin’;
Sure you can do anything when you talking or writing, it’s not like living when
you can only do what you doing….I’m gonna try to make sense and tell the truth,
else what’s the fucking use? Ain’ enough lies and shit out there already?”
Lee Daniels, the exuberant, openly
gay, African American director of the new film Precious claims to have
kept Sapphire’s novel under his pillow for several years ‘til he could persuade
her to trust him with the film rights. Daniels says parts of Precious’ story
oddly echo his own bumpy childhood, bringing back painful memories of a young
queer boy being beaten by his cop dad for wearing his mom’s high heels.
Although I didn’t realize it at the
time, Lee Daniels produced one of my favorite movies of the decade, 2002’s Monster’s
Ball, a dark drama about deeply flawed families, interracial romance and
suppressed rage that provided Halle Berry with a best actress Oscar and gave
the late Heath Ledger a test run at a taciturn, damaged soul who would later
morph into Brokeback Mountain’s Ennis Del Mar.
Intuitive, pitch perfect casting –
mixing newcomers with established stars – has been a trade mark of Daniels’ collaboration
with ex-boyfriend, casting director Billy Hopkins: Cuba Gooding jr. facing off
with The Queen’s Helen Mirren as contract killer lovers in Daniels’
dizzily offbeat directorial debut, the underrated Shadowboxer.
Shadowboxer is in some ways
an improvement over Precious in that the director is a tad less
reverential with his treatment of an improbably plotted genre piece that
contains tantalizing glimpses of its director’s worldview: including one
slapdash scene that has a young doctor to the mob (a breezy, impudent Joseph Godon-Levitt)
caught with his head up another woman’s pussy, only to be caught red handed by
a girlfriend, named Precious: captured with a bristling fury by standup comic Mo’Nique.
In Precious Daniels and
Hopkins employ their casting moxie to deflect African American concerns that a
realistic evocation of an overweight black teenager’s rape and abuse at the
hands of her ghetto parents might seem exploitive if not cushioned by the same
kind of glamorized casting choices that marked the filming of Alice Walker’s The
Color Purple.
In bringing Precious to the
screen Daniels has chosen to present the first act as an acid trip like chamber
of horrors: Precious is almost destroyed by a pair of villains worthy of
Dickens – a profane, violent mom (a searing, Oscar worthy, no holds barred
performance by a deglamorized Mo’Nique) and a sexually rapacious dad, so
surreally depicted he seems more like a predatory ghost.
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It’s when Precious (brought to life
with a ferocious aplomb by newcomer Gabourey Sidibe) flees her slum nest – with
her second child by her dad, just ahead of a TV hurled like a mortar by a
furious mom with the most perverse abandonment issues -- that the film loses
the novel’s unique take on the proposition that the personal is political. In
the book Precious is deeply suspicious of the motives of her welfare case
worker – suspicions confirmed when she swipes her file only to discover that
her case worker has been quietly arranging for her a life of virtual indentured
servitude, with Precious leaving school to become a home care worker, wiping
old white folks’ asses for slave wages. In the film a plain dressed, striped of
makeup Mariah Carey turns the welfare worker into Precious’ only friend outside
of her alternative school reading program.
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In both book and film Precious’
redemption comes under the guidance of an out lesbian teacher, Ms. Rain (Paula
Patton), who gives Precious a notebook with the instruction to bare her soul to
a class of malcontents only a Fox TV producer could love. In the book one of
Precious’ classmates is a young “Harlem Butch,” Jermaine Hicks, whose
autobiographical essay in the final part of the book provides a parallel queer
girl’s escape from hell that is as riveting as Precious’ own journey. With the
exception of a gay nurse, saucily evoked by Lenny Kravitz, and one scene with
Ms. Rain’s girlfriend, queer characters assume much less importance in
Precious’ precarious redemption.
As with Steven Spielberg’s awkward
adaptation of The Color Purple, the question arises whether the screen
can justify tears that were honestly summoned for the printed page. If your
answer is yes, give thanks to a performer who bursts on to the screen in a
manner very different from but just as memorable as Divine’s hollering out for
her cha-cha heels under a soon to be destroyed Christmas tree at the beginning
of the great John Waters’ cannon.