Precious: Based on the Novel Push by Sapphire

Grade: Non Applicable

Yes, I’m totally copping out. Call a cop.

As a young woman who has survived more physical, emotional and spiritual brutality than any human being should ever have to endure, Gabourey Sidibe is nothing short of absolutely brilliant.

As a mother who is one of the most severely, disturbingly damaged individuals one is ever likely to encounter, Mo’Nique is nothing short of absolutely brilliant. She damn well better win the Oscar.

As a teacher who gives a damn - heart, mind and soul - for her students, Paula Patton is brilliant. Her students are so jarringly, beautifully, endearingly portrayed I'm still not sure if they were actors or not.

And yes, as a social worker in way over-her-head but trying, trying, trying valiantly on behalf of her client, Mariah Carey is brilliant (so much so that I knew I knew her but couldn’t place where).

And the film is so bleak, dire and depressing I literally wanted to put a bullet into my brain.

Raped, brutalized, exploited by both father and mother, Precious is a character who will sear herself into your memory. Emotionally vacant, dead inside, much of the film is a flatline of utter despair and hopelessness. Glimpses into a fantasy life represent her only fleeting moments of relief, all too quickly dragged back into the reality of a sub-human but all too human existence. She is a survivor, she is a fighter, she is indomitable, but she is also rather doomed.

Have you broken out the flask yet? It gets worse.

As a mother who is broken beyond all repair, Mo’Nique portrays a woman almost animalistic (scratch the almost) in her craven need for her twisted and distorted definition of love. She is an inner child howling for someone to take care of her, but she is so cruel, evil and destructive that one’s unwilling sympathy merges with much greater contempt and the desire that someone please put her out of her misery. And ours.

There’s family dysfunction, and then there’s something so far beyond that Webster’s has yet to put a name to it.

It is impossible to grade this film because, as harrowing, real, moving and illuminating much of it may be, I simply refuse to take on the responsibility of recommending you sit through it. It would be like encouraging you to invade someone’s privacy.

Several years back, I attended an event for the Lesbian and Gay Anti-Violence Project, where the “entertainment” was a woman who sang of the brutality perpetrated against her people:

I’m black, and you beat my body. I’m in chains, and you beat me down...

No one really knew whether to be moved or mortified. Personally, I chose the latter.

I’m reminded of the experience because, yes indeed, life is a bitch and then you die. I’m not sure just how much I want to be reminded how very much worse it is for others than it is for me. I guess I’m an awful human being that way.

Abandon hope all ye who enter here.

More More Info: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0929632/