Review: Precious
Gabourey Sidibe plays Claireece Precious Jones, a bull-like outcast who can strike with surprising swiftness when anyone messes with her. She has watchful, distant eyes that reminded me of kids I’ve seen in school, or in the neighborhood, the ones that don’t fit in and have a repellent air of emotional deprivation about them. It comes as a strange but fitting surprise to find Sidibe quoting the equally despised Dawn ‘Wienerdog’ Wiener from Welcome to the Dollhouse as an inspiration and call to acting.
Precious really only speaks when absolutely necessary. In her darkest moments, we enter her imagination as she reverts to a fantasy life where she parades on a red carpet, or looks at herself as a glamorous white girl the mirror, or dances up a storm in a sexy R’n’B film clip. It is not a stretch that an illiterate, socially isolated girl would imagine herself in these mainstream visions of happiness, although there would have been scope here to make these fantasies more interesting by revealing idiosyncrasies and imaginative depths of her character.
Instead, the filmmakers resort to a voice over, which is indicative of the inconsistent mish-mash that is this film. It has Precious commenting on the proceedings in the past tense, with a poetic and highly self-aware voice. By backing Precious up with this jarring voice, it seems like the filmmakers don’t fully trust what’s on the screen or that she is capable of exceeding her circumstances.
Even so, the film takes the unusual stance of putting a victim of incest squarely at the centre of its narrative in a visually brash and darkly humorous way. Depictions of similar taboo themes in American films are often so tragically intense and in-your-face, to the point where they become unintentionally funny. The pedophile in Little Children, a humourless film about middle-class angst, ends up castrating himself in a children’s playground. In the teen flick Girl, Interrupted, the victim of incest ends up going mad and topping herself.
Even though Precious may not survive, the film hopes to convey that she has the wherewithal to live with some dignity; as she tells her classmates, she attends survivors of ‘insect’ meetings. In the end, the narrative confusion in this film doesn’t really serve the incredible character of Precious. Rather, it’s the survivor’s instinct conveyed in the monumental Gabourey Sidibe’s restrained, blank faced, tough’n’sweet performance that conveys the real heartbreak of neglect.
