Precious Based on the Movie Female Trouble by John Waters | Scanners
Mother Mary delivers a dramatic speech (we know it's a performance -- whether what she says is true or not) about how her husband molested their young daughter while they were all together in bed and he was sucking milk from her teat, even though she'd long since stopped breastfeeding the girl -- her man kept her milk coming -- and she was jealous of the baby for stealing her lover. So, that's effed up no matter how you slice it. Yet she defiantly (seriocomically) maintains that nobody should judge her. Precious, however, certainly does. And the counselor, Mrs. Weiss (Mariah Carey), definitely does, exiting the scene as though she's about to vomit. (Don't blame her.) And the movie absolutely sure as hell does. Mary is rightly condemned to movie-hell (non-existence), when Precious tells Mary she won't be seeing them anymore. It's meant to be a breakthrough. Precious walks out, the newly self-realized teenager carrying her babies into the street for a speciously triumphant finale as she marches off to... what? It's a good place to end the story.
The movie's strategy, from the beginning, is to dump one or two sensational bombshells on us at a time, usually in the form of revelatory expositional dialog: Meet Precious, an obese and inarticulate black girl who lives in poverty with her mother in Harlem. Precious is illiterate. And her mom berates her, throws objects at her and kicks her. And she once had a child by her father, who raped her. And that child, now being raised by a grandmother, has Down's Syndrome and they call her Mongo (as in "mongoloid"). Oh, and she's currently pregnant with a second child by her father. And did we mention that the father has AIDS? And Precious is HIV-positive, too? And...
Sapphire says she based her novel on memories of people in Harlem in the 1980s. All of them, apparently. This is one hell of a composite character. Throwing everything into one story -- even if each individual thing is based in reality -- does not necessarily make for a tale, even a fairy tale, that works as drama. Better as comedy.
The one thing that genuinely troubles me about "Precious: Based on the Novel Push by Sapphire" (and, yes, I love using the proper title, just as I long have with "The Decline of Western Civilization II: The Metal Years") is not that some people have taken it seriously (it's serious and funny), but that they have taken it literally.
