"Precious': Ghetto fantasy film

Each year brings us a politically correct feel-good movie with Oscar bounce that exploits one of the devastating social problems of our tottering republic, gives us (if we're so inclined) a good cry, and enables us to walk away from it again in good cheer. This year's entry is Lee Daniels's Precious, which, as most everyone must know by now, concerns an obese, horrifically abused African-American teenager who goes by her middle name of Precious.

Precious (Gabourey Sidibe) lives in Harlem at the fag-end of the Reagan decade. It may be morning elsewhere in America, but sun never penetrates the squalid walkup flat where Precious lives with her mother Mary (Mo'Nique), a welfare zombie, and her father, Carl, who has just left Precious pregnant again with her second incestuous child.

Precious hasn't got a prayer in this world. Her three-year-old daughter, Mongo (short for Mongoloid, the now incorrect word for Down's Syndrome), lives with her grandmother and shows up only when the social worker pays a perfunctory call. As for pre-natal care for the new baby, well, Precious tells us she's never seen a doctor in her life, and no one seems to think she needs one now.

She's also been shunted into an "alternative" school where she will duly graduate into general ed oblivion; at 15, she is wholly illiterate. More rapes and more babies will doubtless follow. As her mother tells her, not unrealistically, Precious needs to stop wasting her time in school anyway and get on "the welfare" ASAP. Trouble is, Reagan wants to make it workfare, which, as Precious calculates it, will leave her with about $2 an hour for changing old white ladies' diapers.

A role model to die for

Precious's only refuge is a gaudy fantasy life in which she imagines herself the object of adoring throngs. In these fantasies she is merely dressed up in dance-floor surroundings; but, facing the mirror, she sees herself as a slender, stylish white blonde, ready for a night on the town. Her self-negation is complete.

Enter her glamorous new teacher, Blu Rains (Paula Patton), white-featured and almost white-colored, a role model to die for. Blu belongs on a Vogue cover, but here she is, nurturing dead-end kids because, she says, she loves to teach.

Blu's curriculum consists, apparently, of journal writing— i.e., self-expression— and Blu's response to every crisis, including Precious's postpartum discovery that she's HIV positive, is to "Write!" Since Precious cannot read a three-letter word, this would seem to be a counsel of perfection.

Not only is Precious reading at eighth-grade level within months, however, but proudly holding a Mayor's Literacy award to boot. While accomplishing this feat, she's also dealing with a newborn infant, homelessness and a near-certain medical death sentence. Miracles will never cease, at least on celluloid.

Standing up to Mom

The film's climactic scene is a confrontation between Mary and Precious, played out in the office of a world-weary caseworker (Mariah Carey, finely understated in a film whose acting style is mostly overkill). Mary's own suffering, hostility and need all tumble out as she recounts the story of Precious's abuse and her own humiliation at being sexually upstaged by a daughter hardly out of infancy.

It's a horrific tale, but it elicits no sympathy, and a stone-faced Precious informs her mother that she'll never see her again. Then she strides out into the daylight, clutching both her children, determined to meet her future.

What's wrong with this scenario? Just about everything. Precious is homeless, penniless and afflicted with a disease that, before antiretroviral drugs, was almost invariably fatal. Who, exactly, has given Precious custody of her two children, to whom she is now fiercely devoted? Where is she going? What fate realistically awaits her?

No matter. Oprah Winfrey put her imprimatur on this film as executive producer, and in Oprah's world, happy endings are always only a talk-show confession away.

Pernicious and false

As for Mary, the film encourages us to throw her under the bus. We might easily do so, too, but for the honesty and nuance of Mo'Nique's portrayal. Seeing Mary in all her own violated humanity, we finally gain some insight into the destructively co-dependent relationship between mother and daughter. That Precious should reject it is understandable, even necessary. But that the film should affirm her dismissal of Mary as a sufficient last word is to promote its fairy-tale vision of the black struggle in America as a matter of individual self-empowerment and will.

This is pernicious and false. Precious may be headed for Hollywood heaven in the film's final frame, but what actually awaits her on any realistic prospectus is penury, suffering and death. And even were this not the case— the HIV complication could, after all, have been omitted— the idea that one can deal with personal and historic trauma by willed rejection and amnesia is a recipe for continued tragedy, however well it may play at the box office.

The straight skinny on obesity

A subtext in the film requires further comment. Precious is hugely obese, and the fact of her girth and the general subject of food plays a prominent role in the story. Obesity was endemic in black slum communities 20 years ago; now it's a national epidemic affecting every sector of American society.

In Precious, Mary deliberately force-feeds Precious to avenge her daughter's "theft" of Carl's affections, hoping to render her ugly and unattractive. This routine sets up a self-destructive pattern of behavior in Precious, who finds in food both pleasure and punishment.

Yet no one, except a male nurse in a maternity ward, suggests that healthy eating is important. Blu in particular is solicitous about feeding Precious when she says she is hungry, and when Precious slugs a female classmate who taunts her about her weight, it's the other girl who gets the punishment, and Precious the psychic stroking.

So, fat is beautiful after all? That's what a burgeoning new industry of fashion designers and self-image gurus would have us believe and accept, as always hunting the almighty buck wherever it can be found.

Of course, the stigmatizing of the obese has been a scandal in America for many years, and no one wants to return to it. Nor is categorizing it as a disease (is any human behavior exempt from the physicians' manual these days?) any more helpful.

But obesity is a public health concern, and insofar as Precious gives it a public profile, its message is decidedly mixed. We are alternately invited to embrace Precious and scoff at her (all the positive messages in the film are delivered by thin people). It is an ambivalence that reflects the moral shallowness and confusion of Precious itself.