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the FAB review the lovely ladies in "Precious" got in the New Yorker!!! Be sure to check it out this month...

Making Peace
By Anthony Lane

The heroine is Clareece Jones (Gabourey Sidibe), a Harlem teen-ager better known as Precious. She is grimly overweight, her face so filled out that the play of normal expression seems restricted; yet Sidibe does wonders with that sad limitation, and we learn to spot the flare of anger in her eyes. She has much to be angry about: aged sixteen, she already has one child, who has Down syndrome, and is carrying another. The father is her own father, who later turns out to be H.I.V. positive. We are forced to watch as she is violated in livid closeup, complete with squeaking bedsprings, a belt being unbuckled above a sweating belly, and—lest the seething aggression of the rape escape us—a shot of eggs sizzling in grease. If the subject were not so grave, you would be tempted to laugh at this desperate overkill of detail. Does the director, Lee Daniels, not realize how such industrial-strength images tend to weaken, rather than fortify, the moral case?

Expelled for being pregnant, Precious seeks alternative schooling at Each One Teach One, a local program for those undesired elsewhere. Her classmates, especially Jo Ann (Xosha Roquemore), whose favorite color is “fluorescent beige,” and Rhonda (Chyna Layne), with her fabulously broad Jamaican accent, are the most naturally uplifting people in the film—far more so than their teacher, Blu Rain (Paula Patton), whose powers of uplift feel like make-believe. She is a vision of tolerant gentleness, who wears a new set of soft fabrics every day and plays Scrabble in the evening with her equally lovely lesbian partner. “They talk like TV stations I don’t watch,” Precious says, but that tart line is not borne out by the film, which drinks in Ms. Rain without demur. The same goes for the fantasy sequences—hugely ill-advised dream clips, showing a richly clad Precious at a movie première or slow-dancing with a hunk. One of them even finds a slender white girl gazing back at her from the bedroom mirror. What we have here is a fouled-up fairy tale of oppression and empowerment, and it’s hard not to be ensnared by its mixture of rank maleficence and easy reverie. The gap between being genuinely stirred and having your arm twisted, however, is narrower than we care to admit.

What rescues “Precious” is the performance of Mo’Nique as Mary, the heroine’s Medusa-like mother. Given her range of leisure interests—smoking, cursing, channel surfing, baby tossing, munching pigs’ feet, and throwing televisions down the stairs—there is no reason that the character should be more than a vicious cartoon. But Mo’Nique gives tremendous life to this dead soul, makes you wonder where her own misery sprouted from, and closes the proceedings with a monologue of selfishness so storm-driven that for a second, despite ourselves, we are almost swept away. Sitting opposite during this tempest is a social worker, Mrs. Weiss (Mariah Carey). Hold on: a stern, song-free, compassionate piece of acting from Mariah Carey? That sounds like one of Precious’s fantasies, but it’s for real. ♦