By Paula L. Woods

“I was left back when I was twelve because I had a baby for my fahver.” Those words were the first of many bombshells in Push, Sapphire’s gut-wrenching debut novel about Claireece Precious Jones, a dark-skinned obese, pregnant, illiterate teen who has suffered every form of abuse at the hands of both parents. When Push was published in 1996 to both rave and outraged reviews, it set tongues to wagging about everything from black teen pregnancy to sexual abuse in families to the politics of a publishing industry eager to plunk down a $500,000 advance for such a sensational version of black urban life. Similar debates have continued for over a decade as “urban lit” gained traction with readers and establishment publishers, begging the question about whether writers of black literary fiction have felt pressured to conform or go unpublished (a subject handled with aplomb by Percival Everett in 2001’s satirical novel Erasure).

The debate will continue with the film adaptation, Precious: Based on the Novel “Push” by Sapphire (its unwieldy title possibly chosen to avoid confusion with a similarly titled sci-fi film released last July). Produced and directed by Lee Daniels from a screen adaptation by first-timer Geoffrey Fletcher, Precious has been generating film industry heat since its premiere and awards sweep at the Sundance Film Festival, where it won the Grand Jury Prize and Audience Award for U.S. drama as well as a special acting award for the performance of one of the film’s co-stars, the comedian Mo’Nique. Subsequent screenings at the Cannes International Film Festival netted the film a prolonged standing ovation, and a People’s Choice Award at the Toronto International Film Festival (a prize also won by eventual Academy Award winner, Slumdog Millionaire). Along the way, Precious picked up a couple of high-profile executive producers and promoters in Oprah Winfrey and Tyler Perry, whose combined marquee value and built-in audiences should give the film that all important first weekend push. In addition, the presence of Mo’Nique, Mariah Carey, Lenny Kravitz, Paula Patton, and Sherri Shepherd will draw more publicity and further muddy the waters for critics and viewers trying to evaluate the film on its own merits.

Bottom line, Precious is an emotional beat-down of a film, raw as an open wound, the script and Daniels’ stripped-down direction taking their cues from the novel in telling the story of an illiterate 16 year-old, pregnant with her second child yet still in junior high school. It’s 1987, and the opening titles convey in Precious’ barely decipherable scrawl the essence of her plight and her anger. As powerfully embodied by newcomer Gabourey Sidibie, Precious is a dark-skinned hulk of a girl who fills the screen in a manner designed to threaten the viewer. Outwardly sullen and unresponsive to her Harlem teachers and principal, inside Precious is a vulnerable jumble of shame, rage, and adolescent fantasies. Much of this is accomplished through extensive voice-overs, normally a risky gamble for a film, but successful because of Sidibie’s biting humor, a cover for the girl’s humiliation over her second impregnation by her father, her inability to read and her predicament as a virtual captive in her own home. Painfully graphic in its depiction of Precious’ rape by her father and continued physical and emotional abuse by her mother, Daniels intercuts every act of present or remembered violence with teen-aged fantasies of Precious walking the red carpet at a premiere, dancing seductively for the ultimate prize—a light-skinned, Al B. Sure wanna-be boyfriend—who later appears ready to whisk her away on a motorcycle a la Tom Cruise in An Officer and a Gentleman. Another fantasy scene involves Precious seeing her reflection in a mirror as a blue-eyed blond, a visual allusion to Pecola Breedlove in Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, a character who is also raped by her father.

As Guillermo Del Toro did to greater effect in Pan’s Labyrinth, Daniels designs these scenes to ease the tension from such a harrowing tale. But instead, they feel manipulative to the point of triteness. Despite all the racially-charged visual shorthand and allusions of rape and female degradation (including uncredited footage of Vittorio De Sica’s 1960 film, Two Women, which Precioius re-imagines as a painfully funny scene with Mo’Nique assuming the Sophia Loren role), the extent to which they work at all is because of the viewer’s sympathy for and identification with Sidibie, the ultimate outsider and child at risk.

Beyond the use of fantasies, Precious depends on two overworked genres to keep viewers engaged.  The first is the “I’ve been ‘buked and I’ve been scorned” horrors represented by Whoopie Goldberg’s Celie in The Color Purple, Halle Berry’s Leticia Musgrove in Monster’s Ball (Daniels’ first produced film) and others that trade in black victimology. Precious invokes these with an ease that makes the audience unwitting accomplices in Daniels’ cinematic crime. Some viewers, by assuming they recognize the lives of all oppressed girls and women in Precious’ story, will cluck their tongues in sympathy or derision, wondering, “Why are black families so dysfunctional?” Others will rage about why such images are served up by producers and studios to the exclusion of more positive representations of black life, demanding, “Where are the positive stories about black folks?”  Either way, Precious wins by making viewers yearn, yet loathe, to look away from the tragedy unfolding on the screen.

It is the evocation of the second film genre—the one in which a dedicated educator changes the lives of one or a group of troubled students (Blackboard Jungle, The Miracle Worker, Lean on Me, et. al.)—that completes the seduction of the audience while simultaneously dragging Precious from the muck of despair. The film’s success in this regard is due not only to Sidibie’s work as the troubled student but the anchoring presence of Paula Patton, who plays Ms. Rain, the writing teacher at Each One Teach One alternative school where Precious is enrolled. Patton’s is a nuanced performance that balances the compassion she feels for Precious and the other girls in her class with pragmatism and a healthy dose of outrage when she asks Precious tough questions about her ability to raise her two children or personally intervenes when Precious finally escapes with her newborn son from the hellhole that is home and is unable to find shelter.

Notwithstanding the performance of Sidibie, solid support from Patton as well as Mariah Carey as a welfare worker and Lenny Kravitz as a nurse, the biggest surprise in Precious is the work of comedian Mo’Nique. Nothing in her previous comedic roles on The Parkers or Phat Girlz, even her dramatic turn in Shadowboxer, Daniels’ 2005 twisted directorial debut, hints at the ferocity she summons to play Mary Jones. Needy and evil, depraved yet pitiful to a degree heretofore unseen in black women on screen, Mo’Nique’s Mary singes the eyebrows off the viewer while setting new lows for black motherhood (Halle Berry’s character’s treatment of her son in Monster’s Ball doesn’t even come close). Lee Daniels has elicited a performance from Mo’Nique so thoroughly vile that it will surely garner the actress further praise and accolades—and Daniels more lucrative opportunities to direct.  It will undoubtedly stimulate increased debate about why such roles and films get the attention of critics and black media tastemakers like Oprah Winfrey and Tyler Perry while other stories go unrecognized or unmade.

Daniels has said of his work in Precious, “I made this film for every person out there who ever looked in the mirror and felt unsure about the person looking back. This is not an art film for a select few. This is a movie that everyone can relate to.”

As disingenuous and publicity-minded as that may sound, given the film’s many art techniques and allusions, the inspirational message in Daniel’s film has been echoed by Winfrey and Perry, who are on the publicity circuit now, connecting their own struggles with poverty and abuse to the film’s message of self-empowerment. As seductive as these inducements may be, watching Precious was a long, painful journey, one that was difficult to take. One can only hope that such trafficking in the sorrows and sad triumphs of Precious provides more than catharsis or voyeurism for audiences and becomes the principals’ hefty down payment on better films to come.

Paula L. Woods’ reviews of books and film have appeared in the Los Angeles Times, Washington Post and other publications. She is the author of eight books, including I, Too, Sing America: The African-American Book of Days, and four Charlotte Justice crime novels, which include Inner City Blues and Strange Bedfellows.