Lee Daniels’s film about an abused Harlem teenager is carried by two remarkable performances, from Gabourey Sidibe and Mo’Nique, and undermined every twenty minutes by its own fantasy sequences. It is worth watching, and it is not as good as its admirers say.
Lee Daniels’s film is about a sixteen-year-old girl in Harlem in 1987 who is beaten by her mother, raped by her father, pregnant for the second time and unable to read, and it wants to send you home hopeful. It manages that about two-thirds of the time. Two performances carry it, from Gabourey Sidibe in her first film and from Mo’Nique as the mother. The daydreams, the classroom and the famous faces in small parts are where it keeps tripping over its own good intentions. It is worth your evening. It is not the great film its admirers describe.
Sidibe plays Precious with her face nearly shut. She walks the school corridors with her head down and her coat on, and Geoffrey S. Fletcher’s screenplay gives her a voiceover that says everything the face will not. It could have been a cheat, and it is not, because Sidibe lets the two disagree. Early on, after a beating, she looks in a mirror and sees a thin blonde white girl looking back, and the voiceover carries on as if nothing had happened. We were more shaken by that than by anything Mary does with her hands.
Mo’Nique’s Mary spends most of the film in an armchair in front of the television, cigarette going, telling her daughter what she is worth. She hits Precious with whatever is in reach and asks her to fetch food in the same breath. We were horrified, and the reason is that Mo’Nique never plays her as a monster. Mary is bored, lonely and jealous of her own child, and she says so out loud, so that the abuse looks like a habit nobody has ever interrupted. She gets one long scene near the end that we will not describe, except to say that it is the only time the film lets her explain herself, and the explanation is worse than the violence.
Andrew Dunn shoots the flat in dim yellow lamplight with the curtains drawn, so that the school scenes, in grey daylight from tall windows, feel like coming up for air. Roshelle Berliner has furnished the flat with things Mary would never let go of: the armchair, the set, a kitchen last cleaned when somebody was last made to clean it. Marina Draghici keeps Precious in the same dark coat and headscarf for much of the film, so that when she is dressed differently we notice. Mario Grigorov’s score stays out of the flat altogether and leaves the sound of it to the television and to Mary.
The daydreams are the problem. Every so often Joe Klotz cuts, mid-blow, to Precious on a red carpet with flashbulbs going and a handsome boyfriend on her arm. The first time, it works: we understand where she goes while her body is being hurt. By the fourth time it is a pressure valve, and the film reaches for it just when it has earned the pressure. The classroom at Each One Teach One has the same trouble. Rita (Stephanie Andujar), Rhonda (Chyna Layne), Jermaine (Amina Robinson), Joann (Xosha Roquemore) and Consuelo (Angelic Zambrana) each get one trait and one joke, and Ms. Rain is written as a saint. Paula Patton plays her as one, which is the only option she was given.
The famous faces are a mixed bag. Mariah Carey, as the social worker Ms. Weiss, has had the glamour taken off her and plays a woman who asks questions and writes down the answers. She is patient and plain, and we forgot who she was, which is the compliment. Lenny Kravitz as Nurse John is a distraction in a hospital scene that did not need one. Sherri Shepherd, as the receptionist Cornrows, gets the film’s few honest laughs.
Daniels does not do restraint, and there are stretches here that wanted some. Fletcher’s script, from Sapphire’s novel Push, follows the old shape of the inspirational-teacher film more closely in the second half than the first. But Sidibe and Mo’Nique are not doing anything old. They play a mother and daughter who have never once been kind to each other, and we believed every minute of it.
It is a 15 certificate at 110 minutes, and it earns the certificate in the first ten. Watch it for those two, and have something gentler ready for afterwards.
