Considering that Precious just took a run at Oscar gold, I figured it was a good time to write up the copy of it Lions Gate sent out to me.

Based on the novel “Push”, Precious follows its title character–a sixteen year old, overweight, illiterate, twice-pregnant girl named Claireece “Precious” Jones.  Precious has big, if implausible, dreams for herself: to become a model, to get a light-skinned boyfriend, be in a BET video.  But she’s got to fend her way through various abusive relationships and chronically low self-esteem and the fact that she’s still in junior high and such to get through.

And though everything looks like disaster in the making for Precious, when she discovers the possibilities in life from an alternative school, the world starts to change.  Will it be enough?

I spent the first few minutes alternately horrified and infuriated by this movie–there’s so much wrong in here that you’d think that nothing good will ever come out of it.  Though it’s easy to forget that some magnificent flowers grow out of truly horrible muck and ordure.

You have to feel for this girl, truly you do, because no matter what you think about the politics of race and the welfare state, it’s easy to forget that there are those out there that are desperately trying to make a better life for themselves and their families, and that, at the end of the day, is the truest measure of the American dream.  It’s the constant pursuit of improvement that measures a life, and this girl has more life in her than some people ever will.

There are some really impressive moments here, and things that will make you laugh and things that will make you think and things that will make you angry.  There will be plenty of melodrama here too, things that make you wildly dissatisfied that they actually tried to pull this stuff off.  There’s stuff here today that hits below the belt and plenty of cheap shots, too.

But at the end of the day, Precious does its job well.  It shows us a young woman in the midst of desperate circumstances out to make something better for herself despite everything.

The Screenhead Ten Scale gives this biting, forceful melodrama a seven out of ten for doing its job, and sometimes just a bit too well.  It has this truly unpleasant tendency to spike the ball, doing what it does well, but then deciding it just hasn’t gone far enough and then putting extra force that it didn’t really need to in.