Harrowing and marked by heroic performances, Lee Daniels' Precious looks squarely in the wounded eyes of its title character and sees a girl with poetry in her. Poetry, and also a fetus conceived in rape by her father. (Don't ask where her mother was, because you're not going to like the answer: beating up on baby girl for stealing Momma's man.)
The producer of Monster's Ball and director of Shadowboxer, Daniels gravitates to scenarios with characters who are in a very dark place and move incrementally toward the light. In Sapphire's novel, Push, set in 1987, he found a character in the darkest place imaginable, chained to abusive parents and lacking the key to free herself.
Dramatically, Daniels' films are akin to sensitivity-training setups that encourage viewers to walk a mile in another's shoes. His movies are hopeful insofar as they deliver their characters from excruciating mental agony to ordinary misery.
In other words, you go to a Daniels movie not to be entertained, but edified. While not everyone goes to the movies for self-improvement, you will leave this one having witnessed phenomenal acting.
As Precious, caged by ignorance and liberated by empathy, Gabourey Sidibe takes the audience from dehumanization to purpose. If the film is inspirational, it's because we see her emotional detachment jolted by the power surge of human connection.
In any drama, a hero is only as compelling as the villain and, man, does Precious ever have one in Mo'Nique (the comedian), unsmiling as Mary, Precious' mother. In their Harlem apartment painted in hues of grease smoke, when not stewing in her own toxic juices, Mary repeatedly violates Precious. Verbally. Physically. Sexually.
