I’ve spent two nights of my life forcing myself to watch the movie “Precious” from beginning to end. SPOILERS FOLLOW.
On Facebook I noted it was the hardest movie I’ve had to sit through since “I am Sam” but now I’d like to modify that. ”Sam” was just a horrible, embarrassing movie that was really the first one at which I had to make myself not leave the theatre. ”Precious” is a different kind of pain.
“Precious” is “Leaving Las Vegas.”
“Precious” is a story of unrelenting doom, but one that doesn’t acknowledge the fact.
And that pisses me off even more than the brutality of the story.
Short-form: It’s 1987 and a young girl lives through horrific physical, emotional and sexual abuse. In one year’s time she goes from being illiterate to reading at the 7th grade level. She’s known nothing but abuse her whole life but manages to be a loving and protective mother to her two children by her own father.
Let’s grant that huge stretch of credulity.
She learns she’s HIV positive. In 1987.
The movie ends with her walking away from her surviving abuser, determined to go to college. She is triumphant.
And HIV positive in 1987.
Roll credits.
Set today, 23 years later I suppose it is possible that Precious could go on and live out all these dreams. AIDS is treatable and can be managed for decades. A real cure or vaccine may even be a reality someday.
But I was there in 1987 and I can assure you with a certainty I have of few other things that if you were HIV positive in 1987 you were dead by 1990.
If you want to show me a movie about Precious going down fighting, trying to discover, live and die with dignity, that’s cool. I’ll watch that movie.
If you want to set it in 2005, as they could have done, and shown Precious learning her humanity along with her drug regimen and triumphing over all her crap, yeah, I’ll watch that too.
Hell, if you want to show me her grown child in 2009, reading the diary of his long dead mother and what she tried to do to give him the chance she never had, I’ll respect the hell out of that movie.
But don’t end this movie with swelling victory music and implied dreams coming true when the truth is Precious dies a miserable death and her kids get put in the system that allowed the abuse that killed her.
You don’t make me watch this kind of explicit human suffering in the name of Truth and then end with a lie.
“Leaving Las Vegas” showed Nicolas Cage drinking himself to death in a way that smacked all the teen party movies and “charming star in rehab” flicks in the face. For all its artistry and hard truth it left me with a headache.
“Precious” left me nauseated and unenlightened. It assumed I didn’t know that poor, obese, dark-skinned, abused illiterate girls with babies live in Hell.
Fine, maybe there’s an audience out there that needs such things explained.
But “Precious” also assumed I’d go along with the idea that a bit of intervention would breathe life into a soul that had been smothered in infancy.
And stave off death from AIDS in 1987.
That kind of flippant Hollywood dishonesty is what I abhor. I can watch hard movies, but don’t make me witness the true inhumanity of this girl’s life and then try to sell me a false happy ending.
See it through.
Otherwise all you’re doing is a Lifetime blaxploitation movie.
