Inessentials

Spoilers for Precious, but none that go beyond a general knowledge of the story

I finally got around to watching Precious: Based on the Novel “Push” by Sapphire. (Yes, that really is the title of the film. They couldn’t keep the title Push because people might have thought it starred Cherie Currie and Captain America.) I had hesitated watching Precious for a long time, in part because reviewers I trust had hated it. But one of my general rules of film viewing is that you should see any film that divides critics sharply. Did some love it and some hate it? Go see it. Was everyone sort of blah toward it? Skip it. So Precious, like Rachel Getting Married or The Box, was something I was going to get around to eventually. (By the way The Box was completely underrated. Tense, loving, thoughtful. Give it a chance.)

Precious is not an easy film to watch. In part, this is because of the subject matter (abuse, incest, poverty, hatred). In part, this is because of worries about how this film might be received (is this reaffirming people’s ideas of welfare moms or urban black experience?). In part, this is because it’s just not a very well made film. And ultimately, it was the last concern that turned me against it.

I admired some of the performances in Precious, and I was won over to the need to tell a story like this, which is under-represented in American filmmaking. But the material is so poorly served by the director, Lee Daniels, that it distracts from any social value that Oprah and Tyler Perry apparently think it has. For example, in one particularly difficult scene, Precious’ mother chases after Precious, screaming abuse and throwing things at her. But Daniels cuts away from this to show a Polaroid of Precious as a baby being held lovingly by her mother. He does this twice. But why? To tell the audience that a mother should love her daughter and not throw things at her? We already knew that. To tell the audience that the mother once loved her daughter? We could assume that, AND it undermines the emotional impact of the scene. Cutting away to the Polaroid ruins the emotional impact of the scene, and Daniels seems not to realize that these sorts of choices can ruin a scene. We don’t need this juxtaposition, because we already understand that things have gone poorly in this mother’s life and she shouldn’t be verbally and physically abusing her daughter. This is just one example of how, throughout the film, themes are underlined, italicized, and highlighted in unnecessary and counter-productive ways. Setting aside the banalities of the story-telling (yes, there’s a teacher who just cares so much, and, yes, Precious steals food because she is so hungry), the film trades in nuance for thematic bludgeoning. But even this trade would be acceptably if there were any new insights being offered. Instead, we have an unhappy mixture of social melodrama and experimental filmmaking, and neither is successful.

This strangely apolitical film, which tries to focus narrowly on one (fictional) girl’s experience, never ventures into truly bold territory, like suggesting what went wrong instead of telling us repeatedly that this is wrong. You know going into the film that incest is awful and devastating, and you know it leaving it. You know going into the film that the world is a mixture of people trying to make it better and people trying to skate by, and you know it leaving it. You know going into the film that some kids are born into a life that’s unfair, and you know leaving it. And for a film whose marketing suggests you’ll leave this movie changed, the film does very little to actually encourage a change in the viewer. This is not a film that can be appreciated on pure filmic grounds, and it can’t be appreciated for its psycho-social insights. And that means there’s not much left to appreciate.

The House Next Door is one of the most thoughtful sites on the web for film junkies, and they’ve reached to new heights with their excellent Pixar Week, which ends tomorrow. Each day has new posts on different aspects of Pixar, generally focusing on thematic analysis of the films.

If you only read one post, I’d recommend “The Studio as Author”, which tracks the theme of individualism and the community throughout the Pixar corpus, while suggesting the possibilities available if we extend auteur theory to include a studio. From there, I would go to The Conversations: Pixar, which examines whether Wall-E is a great film or merely great-for-a-kids’ film. (The Conversations is a monthly column that delves very deeply into a particular film. It’s consistently one of the best places for thoughtful film engagement on the internet.)