Heavyweight champion

PHILADELPHIA'S Lee Daniels isn't just the producer and director of "Precious," he's its Capt. Chesley Sullenberger.

As a movie, "Precious" is a perilous ride, one that often feels ready to nosedive, but never does. Against long odds, Daniels brings it to a safe and improbable landing, an outcome that under the circumstances feels like a triumph.

It's hard to believe the movie got off the ground at all - its title character is a poor, illiterate, unglamorous 300-pound African-American girl, both an unwed mother and abused daughter. It goes without saying the movie is independent - you can imagine how far the script would get in Hollywood, once they measured the story against their marketing metrics and demographic quadrants.

Precious is played by an unknown, Gabourey Sidibe, who's given a large and daunting job. She's tasked with pulling us into this harsh story of suffering and striving, and keeping us there, even as the narrative pushes the boundaries of credibility and tact.

Sidibe's an obscure amateur, and yet all around her are celebrities - Mo'Nique, Lenny Kravitz, Mariah Carey - asked to disappear into this strange mixture of redemptive fable and real-life horror movie.

It's tricky material, adapted faithfully by Daniels from the novel "Push" by Sapphire. The book has widely been described (with sarcasm) as an example of pulpy urban lit, but that's wide off the mark. Sapphire, a Brooklyn, N.Y., poet, wrote it in stylized street argot, meant to convey Precious' untutored voice, a technique as old as "Huckleberry Finn," who's mentioned in the book, one that's crammed with literary tributes and allusions.

It's literature that looms as a possible savior for Precious, who's chucked out of public school when the principal discovers she's pregnant. Her choices are life at home on welfare with her monstrous mother (Mo'Nique) or an alternative school for troubled girls, run by a saintly teacher (Paula Patton) who challenges her students to read and write as a means of expression and understanding.