Precious

A 2009 US festival circuit hit under the name Push, the re-titled Precious: Based On The Novel Push by Sapphire rocks into town garlanded with the kind of superlative praise liable to stir cynicism even in the gooiest of hearts. Cynics, soften yourselves: this is a good film despite the whiff of Oprah's Book Club that clings to its publicity campaign.

Geoffrey Fletcher has adapted performance poet Sapphire's first novel with a light touch, despite the dark depths it plumbs. Lee Daniels' directorial style on the other hand, is anything but light, hammering home the horrors of poverty, illiteracy and physical and sexual abuse suffered by teenaged Precious, played with incredible control by newcomer Gabourey Sidibe.

Precious is a Harlem teenager whose name feels like a sick joke; she suffers daily a machine gun volley of insults and flung objects from her monstrous mother (an award-winning Mo'Nique), even as she carries a second child by her own father. And yet her escapist fantasies, as she takes tiny steps out of the cycle in which she is trapped, swell with an imagination which, if limited by her own narrow experience of life, is livelier than most people she encounters would expect of her

So what if Precious' daydreams are an objectively prosaic whirl of red carpets, magazines and paparazzi adoration? Given her circumstances, it's something that she allows herself to dream at all. More disturbing is her wistful fantasy of herself as a thin white woman, which makes its point about the media's screwed up messages around race, size and aspiration more forcefully than screeds of statistics about social inequality could.

The subject matter of Precious is what film critics are fond of calling gritty, real and uncompromising. Many would-be directors of gritty, real and uncompromising films fall into the trap of assuming a film's technique and style must match its content. They believe that in order to truly embody this elusive trinity, their film should also look gritty, look real and look uncompromising. Although he's hardly subtle, director Lee Daniels' avoidance of this trap with sporadic flourishes of colour and life is just one of the compelling things that elevates Precious above a weepie-of-the-week tragathon.

1950s era drama broke new ground in declaring, with the so-called kitchen sink theatre of playwrights like John Osbourne, that the problems of the working class were as important as those of the more affluent. For the first time, directionless anger and suburban cruelty were acknowledged as dramatically valid. With Precious, Lee Daniels shows a contemporary Harlem version of this, but also the humour, fantasy and daydreams of people trapped in a life that appears to offer very little opportunity for self-determination.

Read an interview with Precious' most unlikely cast member, Mariah Carey