A Gem in the Peripheral

Matt Damore

I just started to watch a movie called 'Precious'. It came out last year and was nominated for Best Picture at the Oscars. I remember seeing the poster for this movie on my way out of Avatar and not thinking much of it. The poster showed the pitch black outline of an obese girl with a snow white background. My imagination immediately jumped to some whacked out, over the top Martin Lawrence comedy, devoid of good humor, destined to be forgotten.

Randomly, I decided to do my usual rounds on imdb.com and at the right of the screen I saw a link to the Oscar nominations this year. And then I saw the movie 'Precious'. The whole title is called: " Precious: Based on the Novel Push by Sapphire". I thought, "Really?" I've never heard of the book, the movie, the author, the actors: nothing. Yet I visited tvshack.net and began watching the movie. The experience was something I'll never forget.

Gabourey Sidibe (also nominated for Best Actress) plays a teenage girl named Precious who basically lives in a Hell. She is raped by her father (many times), gets pregnant, and gives birth to a baby with Down Syndrome, who is mostly taken care of by the grandmother. The mother is a mess, physically and emotionally abusive. She becomes jealous of Precious because her husband desires the daughter over the wife! Yet the mother takes it out on Precious, showering on her a deluge of profanity-filled insults. She abuses the welfare system and teaches Precious to prefer being a welfare leech instead of going to school. Nevertheless, different people intersect with the life of Precious to help pull her out of despair and abuse.

What is compelling about this movie is the character Precious. She is quiet, but imaginative; she is - by society's standards - fat, unattractive; inwardly - as we come to be acquainted with, during her voice-over, inner monologue - a wonderfully imaginative, strong, and resilient young girl with lots of promise and hope.

The style of the movie is wonderfully unorthodox. We have quick cuts from the real Hell of Precious' experience to the ideal safe-house of her imagination, with various images and sounds edited into the sequence to suggest the flitting hither and thither of her erratic consciousness. We see visual representations of her hopes and dreams, her escapism to help her cope with the bleakness of her present situation.

Her posture is quiet, almost having the gait of a penguin; but she can lash out like a lion if provoked. She is the girl we've all seen in the corner of our eye but perhaps dismissed in a quick, knee-jerk kind of way, falling prey to our conditioned stereotypes, but - in reality - there lurks underneath a real beauty.

The movie as a whole is a triumph and I'm actually rooting for this film to win Best Picture, or at least for Sidibe to win Best Actress. The film really brought to life - for me - that underneath the surface of everyone there is a history. If we can just learn to listen, we can see and understand beauty from the nooks of life we never knew existed.