Precious based on the novel by Sapphire

I had mixed feelings about the prospect of seeing Precious based on the novel by Sapphire (which from this point on will be referred to as Precious), when it first came out. The trailer itself made me tear up a few times, and who wants to go to the movies and be that depressed? A few tears are fine, but you have to be in a certain kind of mood to put yourself through that much emotional torture. With this in mind, I didn’t see the film when it came out. Instead I watched it for the first time over the weekend.
The trailer gives away 90% of the bad things that happen to Precious. She is 16, still in junior high school, her mother beats her, and she has two children from her father. After seeing the trailer, you would think they have already told you everything that has gone wrong in her life, so you enter the movie thinking you are going to see a character film about the way this young girl deals with all of these issues. You would be right for the first three quarters of the film. Then, director Lee Daniels hits you with one last blow, the killing blow, the point at which you begin to weep uncontrollably. This emotion is only perpetuated when Precious utters the exact word you are thinking, “Why?”. Only a film that spends the first three quarters building up this painful back story could put that much impact in that one word. The word that is every four year olds favorite, and every debater’s go to question. The word that we all ask ourselves when things begin to look bleak, but after seeing this movie, it will be hard to ask that question again unless your circumstances are really bad.
The style of the film was very in the face of the characters. At times I wanted the scene to switch to a medium wide shot to help relieve some of the tension, but the the scene wouldn’t have been as impactful if it had. There are points when the close-ups become almost too much to handle, constantly bombarding the audience with a claustrophobic feeling that pushes viewer’s to their emotional limits, and it seems that if there were 30 more seconds of close-up in the film, many of us would have hit our breaking point and simply stopped caring. It’s not a popular thing to say, but there comes a point when the audience just can’t take any more emotional abuse and they just shut down, and Precious tested that breaking point.
Overall I would recommend this film for that rainy night when you need a good cry. It’s great at pulling at your heart string and driving home the idea that other people have it much worse than you. It’s not something to watch on a sunshiny day, or one in which life looks bleak. Be careful when you choose to watch the film, but do watch it eventually.