Precious — What Matters, What Doesn’t

Precious now has a 61 rating on Metacritic. This might matter more if the film hadn’t yet been screened and won two major awards heading into the race. Okay, so maybe Sundance isn’t a major award, but for this film it set up a precedent that is likely to continue. It has heat, it has momentum. It doesn’t have two New York critics from The New Yorker and from New York Magazine. Somehow, though, this is kind of beside the point. If the film were being judged/seen this week for the first time we would all write it off. But it has been vetted, as I’ve already written in the comments, long before it will have hit theaters. To that end, the festival route has been great for Precious. I have read some really great reviews on the film. This one by Drew McWeeney at Hitfix worth a read. And here, Scott Foundas of the Village Voice is one New Yorker who went another way – high praise for Mo’Nique and for Sadibe:

A former casting director, [Lee] Daniels shows undeniable savoir faire with his actors, a mix of musicians and comedians effectively cast against type, from a dark-haired, deglamorized Mariah Carey as a tough-love social worker to a subtle Lenny Kravitz as an attentive male nurse. The picture belongs, however, to the gale-force Mo’Nique, who transforms an ostensibly one-note monster mom into a complex portrait of a psychologically damaged woman (no matter that Daniels seems to have edited her most showstopping scene in a blender), and to the magnanimous Sidibe, who carries the alternately exhausting and exhilarating narrative on her formidable shoulders. For most of the movie, her stoically beautiful face stays wrought tight in a mask of sadness and self-loathing. When she relaxes those muscles ever so slightly‚Äîone of the movie’s few subtle touches‚Äîit is like a weight of centuries has been lifted.