Raw, harrowing and undeniably unsettling, the controversial, much-anticipated Precious arrives on waves of film festival buzz this week. See it at your own risk, but be forewarned: it is not for the delicate of stomach or faint of heart. Nevertheless, it is so powerful a depiction of abuse among the mentally challenged and socially disenfranchised that it even manages to rise above what may well be the most pretentious title of the year. Yes, it’s actually called Precious: Based on the Novel “Push” by Sapphire—an albatross that won’t fit on any marquee, destined to keep potential filmgoers away by the thousands. You can’t even say it, much less remember it.
This is a shame, because Precious is one of the most unforgettable films of the decade. Business will probably build with the endorsement of Oprah Winfrey, who had already seen it before she signed on as executive producer. At this year’s Toronto Film Festival, she said it left her gasping for air, adding that she sees women like Precious on the street constantly and even saw herself in the character. This is hard to believe, since Precious is an obese, illiterate 16-year-old in the slums of Harlem who is verbally and physically assaulted on a daily basis by her vile, addicted mother and pregnant by her own father for the second time. Newcomer Gabourey Sidibe, an office worker who beat out 500 seasoned actors for the title role, is positively astounding. Like everything Oprah promotes, the movie follows the classic Oprah formula: mix one part suffering with two parts redemption and watch the audience squirm, then cry.
Claireece “Precious” Jones is plagued by more suffering than most people have the strength to endure in a lifetime. Shuffled between a father who rapes her, and a chain-smoking slob of a mother who force-feeds her junk food in the hope that she will grow lethargic and fat enough to qualify for food stamps, Precious confides to her welfare worker she had her first baby on the kitchen floor while her mother was kicking her. (The mother now calls the baby “Mongo”, which is short for “mongoloid”.) The mother is both brutal and sympathetic, thanks to the cliché-resistant direction of Lee Daniels and a blazing performance by the potty-mouthed, two-fisted comedienne Mo’Nique. Salvation is rendered by a beautiful teacher improbably named Blu Rain (Paula Patton) who teaches Precious to read, write, confront her demons by keeping a journal, and come out of her shell long enough to stand up for her own rights, and by a dowdy, plain-speaking social worker (played by singer Mariah Carey with no makeup and a look of dour exhaustion) who helps Precious find some dignity in a life of hell. The movie is about the struggle to survive in the face of severe adversity, and the message is that every undervalued Precious deserves respect as a human being.
To reach this moral, you are first subjected to almost as much pain as Precious. Already in the ninth grade and incapable of making complete sentences, she constructs barriers between the misery inflicted by her parents and by the other girls in her alternative learning program. This is obviously a girl who never heard of portion control. Destitute and hungry, there’s a scene where she steals an enormous bucket of Kentucky Fried Chicken, wolfs it down running, and throws up on the street. Some of it is humorous, but most of it is downright shocking as Precious bravely bears black eyes inflicted by her mother and heartbreaking humiliations from classmates who make oinking pig noises when she leaves the room. By the time her mother throws her new baby on the floor in a lacerating tantrum, there will doubtlessly be a few who head for the exit doors. There isn’t much for Precious to live for. When she looks up toward Heaven, it’s not in pride, but with the hope that a grand piano will fall on her head.
Miraculously, she can still dream. Depression lifts only when she escapes reality long enough to imagine she’s a model or a rock star, dressed in feathers and finery, like Jennifer Hudson in Dreamgirls, for a movie-musical camera closeup. In the fantasy sequences, director Lee Daniels relieves the tension by creating an inner world of celebrity and adoration that people like Precious only see on a TV screen in the squalor of their dimly-lit rooms. The highs and lows in Damien Paul’s screenplay capture the mood and imagination of the book by Ramona Lofton (“Sapphire”), who based the hardscrabble story on events she witnessed when she was a teacher in Harlem, and the magnificent actors are all inspired, many of them sure bets when awards season arrives. When she finally discovers an inner spirit that emerges after years of ignorance and neglect and summons the courage to leave home, you may applaud through your tears, but you won’t look at the next Preciouses you see on the subway and find them invisible.
The Men Who Stare at Goats, the latest George Clooney fiasco, is like getting stung by a wasp on the inside of your eyelid. You are blinded to all reason and the agony lasts for days. Despite his easygoing charm and obvious good looks, George Clooney’s choices in films add up to an appalling lack of both intelligence and taste. He just doesn’t seem interested in narrative movies that make sense, and even worse, he has an exasperating tendency to turn his projects over to buddies and basketball cronies, whether they have any talent or not. (In George Clooney movies, talent is optional.) The result is a depressingly high track record of incomprehensible bores like Solaris, Syriana, Michael Clayton, the dumb, overplotted Ocean’s flicks by the overrated Steven Soderbergh…the list is long. In fact, the marvelous and insightful Good Night, and Good Luck is the only major exception in a career notable for frat-house one-liners and photo-op mugging over artistic quality. At the press conference for The Men Who Stare at Goats in Toronto, when asked what drew him to a movie this bad, he dead-panned “I’ve known Grant Heslov [the director] since 1992, and he has some compromising photos of me, so I really had no choice.”
It’s hard to believe this is the same Mr. Heslov who helped write Good Night, and Good Luck, about Edward R. Murrow and the McCarthy witch hunts. He may be Clooney’s long-time filmmaking partner, but he is certainly no director, and this wobbly, one-legged directorial debut proves it. It’s supposed to be a takeoff on Dr. Strangelove, with all of the slobbering, winking, brain-dead overacting from the abominable Oh Brother, Where Art Thou?, pasting together disconnected stories from a book by Jon Ronson about the U.S. Army’s use of parapsychological research in Iraq. Ewan McGregor, who shows up in what feels like at least half of the movies released today (and getting worse in each one), plays a down-and-out reporter from Michigan who travels to Fort Bragg in 1983 to interview a top-secret brigade of psychic and paranormal soldiers trained in New Age warfare. The result is surreal and patently absurd as he tags along to Kuwait as a war correspondent with a gang of illogical military muttonheads trained to make themselves invisible and impersonate Jedi warriors in Star Wars epics, run through walls and kill goats by staring them to death. Dedicated to ending the “war on terror” without violence, these “warrior monks” hike across the Iraq desert in search of the founder of the“First Earth Battalion”—a pony-tailed acid head freak named Django (Jeff Bridges, recreating his impersonation of The Dude in The Big Lebowski). As part of their combat training, he encourages his foot soldiers to stop shaving, grow long hair, wear Jedi robes, and dance—a natural for Clooney, who is in civilian life a dance instructor. Spouting nonsense about steroids, solar cooking on sand dunes, and performing sadistic experiments on animals, their nemesis is new recruit Kevin Spacey, whose special talent is spoon bending. They’re all crazy, none of their theories work, and neither does the movie.
The structure is nothing more than a series of anything-goes contrivances. It is never clear what the goal is (the reporter narrates: “I was on a mission—even I didn’t know what the mission was”), although when recruited to find the hideout of General Noriega, the Jedis say, “Ask Angela Lansbury”. Paranoid and nutty as an Almond Joy, Bridges uses pension fund money to hire hookers and, inspired by the discovery that the Russians are torturing kittens in the name of psychic warfare, uses Barney the Purple Dinosaur’s “I Love You” song as a torture technique of his own. When he finally gets a dishonorable discharge, you wonder why it took the Pentagon so long. Using his Jedi powers for evil instead of peace, Clooney comes unhinged and has Jonathan Demme-homage nightmares called “The silence of the goats.”
Episodic and broadly incoherent, the direction is all over the map, and the acting is so atrocious it wouldn’t get past a “Saturday Night Live” dress rehearsal. There’s a big difference between comic acting and just plain goofing around, but nobody seems to know what it is. Clooney knocks himself out making fun-house faces, but shows no real talent for political satire. (Don’t the people who financed this trash remember him in Three Kings?) The script by Peter Straughan is demented jabberwocky that just makes you groan. Example: the Jedi motto is “I will drink your blue water, live in your red clay, and eat your green skin.” Huh? Say what? This cinematic Katrina is only 93 minutes long but seems like 93 days at hard labor.
Many films have been made about the perils of parenthood, but none with a more attractive and entertaining mom on the verge of a nervous breakdown than Uma Thurman in Motherhood. (Except, of course, the frazzled and terminally adorable Diane Keaton in the unforgettable Baby Boom.) But Ms. Thurman has her charms, too, as Eliza Welch, a once-promising writer who sacrificed her own career to raise two children and a distracted husband (Anthony Edwards), who isn’t much help at home and doesn’t bring in much money as a minor editor who collects rare books retrieved from garbage cans. They live in the insufferable clutter of two adjoining rent-controlled walkups on a street in Greenwich Village so quaint that the traffic is always blocked on both sides by movie companies filming Hollywood comedies in the neighborhood. If only Eliza’s life was half as glamorous. But she’s a different anomaly than Julia Roberts. Motherhood is about one exhausting day in her life that will make any sane man or woman—married, single, or gay—stock up on birth control pills and pray.
Imperfect, unsexy, bespectacled Uma is a far cry from all the Kill Bills, but there is no better proof of an actor’s skill than a role that requires her to do several things at once. She’s a multi-tasking mother machine, all right, and watching her painfully survive never-ending stress made me want to kill myself. Between chores—climbing three flights of stairs 20 times a day, throwing a birthday party for her six-year-old daughter, running the vacuum, laundering piles of dirty underwear, reading myriad books by nutty chld psychologists, lugging a kid in one arm and an incontinent dog in the other while trying to move her car to the opposite side of the street for alternate street-cleaning parking, and making lists, lists, lists—she also sharpens her writing skills in a daily blog. Ms. Thurman does a nice job of building frustration and aggression simultaneously—which, in her case, means smoking and yelling. But consummate over-achievers never rest, so in her spare moments (huh?) Eliza enters a magazine contest to catalogue her thoughts about “What Motherhood Means to Me”—in 500 words or less! Oh, yes. The deadline is midnight.
The worst pitfall of all this responsibility is that nobody seems to care at all. They all take Eliza for granted, and she ends up so desperate for affection that when she finally gets a chance to soak in a hot tub, all she can think of is the confession by her ditzy, pregnant best friend Sheila (Minnie Driver) who used her child’s motorized bathtub toy for a dildo. Forced to do all the shopping on her bike because the car has been towed to make room for yet another movie-location shoot, loaded with handfuls of party supplies including a birthday cake on which the bakery has misspelled her daughter’s name, she accepts a friendly offer from a handsome delivery boy to drag the shopping bags up the stairs and invites him in. Not for romance (although you kind of hope things will kick up a notch) but just to see if she can still dance. Sometimes you just wish Eliza could send her eccentric, disorganized husband and her two yapping, skirt-yanking kids to camp and go to bed with a copy of “How To Be Your Own Best Friend”.
Nothing clichéd or expected ever happens the way you think it will. This is simply a film about how under-appreciated motherhood is. Women are so challenged and over-extended they no longer even aware of their own priorities. There are rewards, too, if you have enough strength, brain cells and muscle tone left over at the end of the day to enjoy them. But according to this movie, amusingly written and directed with savvy by Katherine Dieckmann, motherhood presents massive potential for mental and physical collapse and keeps both psychiatrists and chiropractors in business. Regardless, Motherhood is Uma Thurman’s movie all the way. She’s in every scene, and she makes each one of them count.