Starring Gabourey Sidibe, Mo’Nique, Paula Patton, Mariah Carey, Lenny Kravitz, Sherri Shepherd
Directed by Lee Daniels
Expectations: Moderate.
Precious tells the story of a 16-year-old girl, pregnant with her second child, and her day-to-day struggles to overcome her abusive mother and her second grade reading and writing levels. The film is an incredibly emotional tale and it is hard to watch at times. Gabourey Sidibe is fantastic as Precious. She really hits the early scenes when Precious is illiterate and then skillfully handles the character’s transformation into a strong woman, focused on her education and her children. For me, this is the stand-out debut performance of 2009 and I hope that she is able to get some more roles that can really showcase her talent and range. Mo’Nique is also fantastic as Precious’s mother. Her Oscar was very well deserved.
From a filmmaking standpoint the film is a bit uneven. There are moments when I felt that director Lee Daniels knew exactly what he wanted to do and he executed it well. For almost every time I thought that though, there would be another time when I felt that he was struggling to figure out exactly how to handle something. I mostly had problems with some of the scene transitions. There were a number of fade-to-black moments after scenes that didn’t make sense and only served to drain the momentum of the film. There’s also a lot of handheld work and on-the-fly snap zooming that really serves no purpose. Handhold it if you want, but we don’t need to see you zoom in, then decide that you need to zoom in more, then to finally zoom back to where we started, all within the space of three seconds.