Title: Precious
Genre: Drama
Length: 120 minutes
Year: 2009
Country: United States
Direction: Lee Daniels
Script: Geoffrey Fletcher
Director of Photography: Andrew Dunn
Editing: Joe Klotz
Music: Mario Grigorov
Production: Lee Daniels, Lisa Cortes y Oprah Winfrey
Interpreters: Gabourey Sidibe, Mo’Nique, Paula Patton, Mariah Carey, Sherri Shepherd, Lenny Kravitz, Stephanie Andujar, Chyna Layne, Amina Robinson, Xosha Roquemore, Angelic Zambrana, Aunt Dot, Nealla Gordon, Grace Hightower, Barret Helms, Kimberly Russell, Bill Sage, Susant Taylor, Kendall Toombs, Alexander Toombs, Cory Davis, Rochelle McNaughton, Roy Anthony, Tarell Harvey and Abigail Savage.
Misery challenges all sorts of progress and dodges the best intentions. In America-the America of Barack Hussein Obama, the dream of a pluralistic social security, universal, and political action aimed at alleviating the suffering of the poor, is unable to move beyond his statement. In 2010, north of Manhattan, New York, scenes are reproduced tat in the twenty-first Century one would only imagine in remote areas of Africa, unrelated to any kind of development and without any hint of morality.
Despite qualifying for a statue of the Oscar in six sections, Precious is a real punch in the pit of the stomach of modern America. It talks about a teenage mother who, rather than fat is hard. A cherub raped by her father since early childhood, submerged in a broken family neighbourhood, Harlem, with significant social wounds that are still open. Although former President Clinton bragged of having taken up residence in a loft in Harlem, for a few people in this part of New York life is still short, painful and cruel.
Precious has experimented so much suffering that she fears nothing and everything matters very little to her. Expelled from public school by some social services surpassed by reality, the protagonist finds the only meaning in life in the virtue of learning. In little time and not without problems, she learns to write, to talk, to take care of her two children and to be herself, with sixteen years of age that, in the depth of her eyes, take the form of endless and dark centuries...
Bravo for Lee Daniels, who has had the courage to bring to the wide screen a crude testimony as a novel, without narrative decorum or dramatic structure, almost like a documentary, like a diary on paper and trampled a thousand times by a corporation that just stares at the television.
A film of those that hurt, but which teach us to see the world as it is, to think and, with a little luck to turn the gestures of solidarity into the most precious treasure of humanity. Precious is not only the story of an overcoming teenage victim, it is also about a lesbian teacher in the service of an NGO, just being a mother and engaging in work beyond the ordinary or reasonable.
All the interpreters meet the role of a sober and well-woven screenplay, open-ended. The presence (one guesses, solidarity-wise) of the emblematic figures of the music world stuck in the skin of secondary players, such as guitarist Lenny Kravitz and singer Mariah Carey are surprising. Another curiosity: in the whole film no one with white skin appears. In a required scene, Precious describes herself as "a bunch of black grease to be removed" ... a seal, a whale, a whore – from the lips of her own mother, someone who in a decade and a half has known anything but affection. In a cinematic world where the love superficially takes so many banal stories, a film about the ultimate and truest reason to love was missing: to be able to chose to live as a person.
