Black and Ugly As Ever--However

Holy-wood is the altar where we worship on Fridays, and weeknights at 7 when Entertainment tonight is on. Holy-wood has a white Lord and white parishioners (mainly), and it repeats mantras until they seem like proverbs. Holy-wood renders premises into cliches, and trends into rules. Even when Holy-wood pastors invite us to share in the communion, and to offer ourselves to collection, it's on their terms. When Sapphire's widely known novel Push entered the church, seeking its box-office Baptism, studio producers lifted their arms high to anoint a sorrowful tale with splashes of contrived conscience, and splatters of pretty.

However irritating that treatment is to lovers of "realistic" tales, the film marches into unknown, unholy territory for the sake of the sermon. To borrow from African American spiritual discourse: everything wrong is ugly, but everything ugly ain't wrong. This is not to say that Precious is preachy, despite its function as a sponge for the social ills blighting our country during the 1980s crack boon.(Won't call it an "epidemic" because that misnomer has been far too good for business.) Precious as the title character, and even as the carefully etched icon of the Black Bastard, has no one to answer to. She stands apart from her own world, so poorly suited for it that her fantastic retreats are a habit born of necessity. But how we explore trauma, along racial battle lines and with gender specifications, pales in comparison to how we examine ourselves as humans accustomed to pain while nearly always turned in the other direction. As much as it might offend our sensibility that Paula Patton limps tiredly through the role as Precious's emotional sponsor, or that Precious herself is a hulking, waddling woman, whose performance rumbles and stirs with both emotion and physicality, the work is present and jarring. Rather than get caught in the weeds of Holy-wood's addition of the pretty (Lenny Kravitz in bits, Paula "Wish You Were Here" Patton, Mariah Carey) we can bow to the church of provocation. Precious, whether you're riled by the Fat Black Bastard lead, or the poverty as Black portraiture, was made to derange our perception. Frankly, its ugliness could neither be ignored nor addressed, but it was an unavoidable phantom lurking from the dreary windows of that Harlem apartment to the child born of incest clumsily toppling the candy tray.

Drug abuse would have been the easy out, in fact. This is full on self-abuse, winding into the artistic depths of Gabourey Sidibe's performance, heaving the epithets from Mo'Nique's quivering lips. This is Popeye Jones ugly. The Holy-wood ramparts soon fall away, however, when bleakness surrounds Precious. Unrelenting, she carries on, just as her tale will, and as long as there are black-and-ugly-as-ever girls living in dirty tenements.

Sadly, precedent stains this movie more than any of its earnestly amateur actors. Lenny Kravitz and Paula Patton fit a mold, just not for this particular piece. Somewhere between Dangerous Minds and Freedom Writers, their roles expired in the Teacher's Lounge with Finding Forrester. Nonetheless, what saddles Precious is its close adherence to trite story lines, and partial characters. Like Crash before it, Precious moves from typical characters in unusual circumstances to unusual characters in droll circumstances. When Mo'Nique makes her most riveting speech, she is sedentary in a grey cubicle, delivering a heartfelt address to...MARIAH CAREY. Even Ms. Sidibe's "precious" moments are lost in the vacancy of Patton's pupils and the cheeky, sorority of their classroom. Perhaps defining "ugly" against this backdrop of empty gloss is the only thing that separates this movie from its distant cousin in Fat Black Bastard-ry, The Blind Side. Then again, maybe chunky sentimentality goes down well at $12 a ticket.

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