Precious

As a film critic, it’s easy to become jaded: you review a film, note its strengths and weaknesses, the camerawork, the performances, all within (for me) 300 words. Thankfully, films like Precious: Based on the novel Push by Sapphire arrive and so thoroughly shake you to your core, evincing the incredible power of cinema.

Precious (Gabourey Sidibe, in an outstanding debut), an obese, intelligent but illiterate teenager, is expelled from school because of her second pregnancy. Unbeknownst to the institution, Precious is physically abused by her mother Mary (Mo’Nique) and raped by her father, who bore her two down syndrome-afflicted children. Precious painfully exists in her surroundings, and dreams her way into an imaginary world of BET videos and movie premieres filled with people who adore her. Fortuitously, Precious enrolls at an alternative school, where her teacher Ms. Rain (Paula Patton) cultivates her intellectual potential, bestowing Precious with the ability to comprehend her reality and finally tell her own story. Similarly encouraging are the determination of social worker Ms. Weiss (an unrecognizable Mariah Carey), her nurse John (Lenny Kravitz) and her classmates.

This film is tough. There are moments so excruciating—executed mainly by Mo’Nique, who will assuredly win an Oscar—they will leave you aghast at their horror and hyper-sensitive to your powerlessness as an audience member. But amidst the devastation, there is comedy, lightheartedness and an overwhelming sense of rebirth. Director Lee Daniels endows his film with astonishing honesty; this is filmmaking at its purest. He, and the miraculous Sidibe, immerse you so deeply with Precious’ struggle that as she rises out of her ashes, you can feel your own soul being uplifted. 

The most powerful film of the year, Precious left me physically shaking and speechless, but forever inspired. It was unlike any movie-going experience I have ever had.