Precious is an up-to-date Mommy Dearest

I watched the movie Precious and what a thoroughly depressing movie it is. First of all this is a movie I don’t typical gravitate to; I prefer some escape-ism in my movies. I could have watched the 11 O’clock news and saved 2 hours of my life. There are spoilers here so if you plan on watching the movie and don’t want to know what happens, stop reading.

As I said before, this is not a movie that I would typically watch, but considering all the hype and Mo’Nique winning the Oscar for best supporting Actress, I should give it the benefit of the doubt and at least check it out, as probably a lot of other people did. First of all Precious is not based on a real person but rather a character in the novel “Push” by Sapphire who based the character Precious on a composite of many young women.

Sapphire is known as a performance poet, sometimes called a spoken word artist. She is also a novelist, Push, was her first novel. The book has been adapted to film with the help of talk show host Oprah Winfrey and playwright-gone-Hollywood Tyler Perry as executive producers.
Push is the story of Claireece "Precious" Jones, an obese black teen who is not only beaten and verbally abused often by her mother, but also sexually abused by her father who is the father of her two children, one of whom is Mongoloid.
When Sapphire was asked: "What was your inspiration for creating such an unforgettable character?” She replied: “She's a composite of many young women I encountered when I worked as a literacy teacher in Harlem and the Bronx for 7 years. Over and over I met people with circumstances similar to hers, many with her amazing spirit. I wanted to create a novel with a young person like that. To me she has not existed in literature before. She existed on TV …but as a statistic -- as an 18-year-old HIV+ woman who can't read with two children. I wanted to show her as a human being, to enter into her life and show that she is a very complex person deserving of everything this culture has to offer.”

Precious is an hour and forty-nine minutes of her being beaten, raped, verbally abused babies being tossed, dropped and fallen onto and if that wasn’t enough let’s give her HIV all this is intermixed with dream sequences of Precious seeing herself dancing at the Apollo, attending premieres, etc. her form of escape in this Hell on Earth. Half way through the movie we meet “Mongole” her first born mongoloid daughter. Mongole is kept by Precious’ Grandmother and doesn’t appear until needed as a prop for Mo’Nique to use as a prop when the Social Worker arrives. Mo’Nique is the essence of absolute evil in her portrayal of Precious’ freeloading off the system abusive Mother and well worth all the accolades and awards she has and will be receiving. Because of her second pregnancy, Precious is sent to an alternative school that is a dysfunctional version of Welcome Back Kotter. It isn’t until the last 5 minutes of the movie that we see precious actually realize how evil her mother truly is and break away from her.

The movie left me thoroughly depressed and emotionally wrecked but not by any fault of the movie itself; the casting and performances we’re phenomenal, especially a make-up void Mariah Carey as a Well-Fare case worker, and the second to last scene showdown between Precious and her mother in the Well-Fare office is some of the most powerful and emotional acting I have seen. It left me in that state because it was an in-your face representation of the way the world is today.

Can you imagine how fun it must have been to make this movie? “OK Gabourey, in this scene, you’re going to be rapped by you’re HIV infected drunken, drug addicted father then after that we are going to move you into the kitchen where Mo’Nique is going to hurl glass vases at you and try to hit you with a frying pan, then we’ll move out to the living room, give you a fake baby and while you are trying to get out of the apartment we’ll hurl a flower pot at the back of your head…oh don’t worry it’s a breakable flower pot.”

I think sometimes I wish I was an ostrich and could hide by sticking my head in the ground (which they don’t actually do), so I did the next best thing I watched The Cannonball Run, I’m OK now.

I know where hamburgers come from but I don’t need to go to the slaughter house to watch them being made.