| Claireece Jones, the Harlem teenager at the center of Precious: Based on the Novel Push by Sapphire, lives in a world of specific and overwhelming horror. She goes by her middle name, Precious, which seems like a cruel taunt, since nearly everyone around her thinks shes worthless and lets her know it. Precious mother, Mary, played with operatic fervor by the comedian MoNique, dispenses a daily ration of humiliation and abuse. The constant verbal and physical violence she directs at her daughter would be shocking even without the monstrous crime that hangs over their dim, dirty apartment like a cloud. Precious, overweight and illiterate — and played by an extraordinarily poised first-time actress named Gabourey Sidibe — has a young daughter and is pregnant for a second time. The father in both cases, who is nowhere to be seen, is Preciouss father too. This information is bluntly presented at the beginning of Sapphires 1996 novel, a first-person narrative composed in rough, stylized dialect. In Lee Danielss risky, remarkable film adaptation, written by Geoffrey Fletcher, the facts of Preciouss life are also laid out with unsparing force (though not in overly graphic detail). But just as Push achieves an eloquence that makes it far more than a fictional diary of extreme dysfunction, so too does Precious avoid the traps of well-meaning, preachy lower-depths realism. It howls and stammers, but it also sings. Mr. Daniels, directing his second feature (after the vivid and ... |
