Life is Precious

Street life: Gabourey Sidibe in Precious

THERE AREN'T too many funny moments in this eviscerating, profoundly uncomfortable urban drama, but many will snigger when Precious, the degraded protagonist, tries to make sense of two new, highly educated friends. "They talk like the TV channels I never watch," she says,  writes DONALD CLARKE

The very stations that Precious avoids – those featuring pointy- headed cultural commentators – have been saying a great deal about this singular film over the past year. Adapted from a cult novel, the picture may have a traditional redemptive structure, but it still finds time to scratch away at a few liberal complacencies. This is the African-American kitchen-sink drama as unrelenting horror show. No wonder it has discomfited some potential allies.

Set in Harlem during the mid- 1980s, the film focuses on an obese, semi-literate teenager named Claireece Precious Jones. In an awful parody of parental affection, her truly monstrous mother, played with gothic menace by the comedian Mo’Nique, addresses the unfortunate girl by her middle name throughout.

How precious is she to the family? Well, her father has twice impregnated her (a child with

Down syndrome lives with granny, and a second is on the way) and her mother’s main forms of communication are the yelled insult and the hurled saucepan. “Love ain’t done nothing for me. Love beat me down. Love rape me. Made me feel worthless,” Precious says in an understandable moment of despair.

A chance of escape emerges early on, when Precious, who has a modest talent for arithmetic, secures a place in a scheme aimed at educating the underclass. Awful things continue to happen, but the poor girl does at least get a sense of hitherto hidden possibilities. Until then, her only escape was – when slapped or raped – to imagine herself dancing down a red carpet or climbing aboard an idealised boyfriend’s shiny motorbike.

Lee Daniels, previously director of a very peculiar Helen Mirren thriller called Shadowboxer, makes a blurred, smoky nightmare of the family home. Employing sickly zooms to folded flesh and damp close-ups of bubbling beans and sizzling pigs' trotters, Daniels creates an environment that has as much to do with Eraserheadas it does with (referenced briefly and explicitly) Italian neo-realist cinema.

Daniels’s efforts would, however, be to no worthwhile effect if he did not have two such extraordinary actors to call upon. Playing Precious, Gabourey Sidibe, in her first professional role, somehow persuades her character’s suppressed decency to ooze through layers of protective aggression and suspicion. Meanwhile, Mo’Nique, deserved winner of a Best Supporting Actress Golden Globe and Oscar favourite, creates one of cinema’s most petrifying mothers.

Oddly, Mo’Nique’s scariest scene comes in a passage of comparative calm. Forced to act the model parent for a visiting social worker, she pulls on a wig and, cradling her sweet but abhorred grandchild, speaks clearly and precisely like a less well-off member of the Cosby family. To this point, she had appeared utterly disconnected from civilised behaviour. The awareness that she knows how grandmothers are expected to comport themselves makes her seem like an even more disturbed class of sociopath. It’s a very queasy moment.

For all the film's power and for all the undoubted sincerity of its makers, there is no getting away from the fact that there are problems with Precious.

The film could be seen as an uncomfortable exercise in ghetto porn: a work that invites the middle-class to tut patronisingly at the wretchedness of inner-city life. It is also highlights narrative cinema's tendency – call it the Schindler's Listeffect – to only address those in truly desperate circumstances when a chance of escape is available. (Oprah Winfrey, the queen of hope, is a key supporter of the film.)

Yet, those worries acknowledged, this remains a disturbing, resonant exercise in creative manipulation. If, after a first viewing, you manage to get it out of your head within

24 hours, then you are a very disciplined individual indeed.