Precious: Based on the Novel 'Push' by Sapphire (***1/4)

A small film that got a lot of attention after getting noticed at the Sundance Film Festival, this turns out to have a straightforward story whose novelty lies in the scarcity of movies about people like Claireece Precious Jones (Gabourey Sidibe), an obese 11^th grader living with her mother in a Harlem apartment, in 1987. It is worth seeing, in part, for that novelty and the good performances, especially by Sidibe and Mo'Nique, as her mother. (Mariah Carey is a pleasant surprise as a social worker, too.) Precious, who is essentially illiterate, has just been placed in an “alternative” education program after getting pregnant, for the second time, by her mother’s boyfriend. The mother character has, essentially, no redeeming features; she is a walking (but mostly sitting and watching television) argument for welfare reform, ordering Precious around like a servant, reacting to her daughter’s rape-induced pregnancy by blaming Precious for stealing her man.

You can watch this movie and get extremely depressed. Precious has nothing good in her life; she has fantasies, but few aspirations and little hope. Or you can watch her, placed with a caring teacher (Paula Patton), and see it as a an inspirational story showing that anyone can be redeemed. (The voiceovers, taking the place of the first-person narrative in the novel, suggest that, at least the illiteracy will be remedied.)

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viewed 12/28/13 on Netflix DVD; posted 1/10/14

The Reader (***1/4)

Three movies in one: a teen boy’s affair with an older woman (Kate Winslet), a young man’s learning about her past, and a grown man’s trying to reprocess the experience years later. The first part is interesting enough, but sort of perfunctory. If you’ve seen one movie about a virgin getting to act out his masturbatory fantasies, you’ve seen them all, and it doesn’t much matter that this takes place in postwar West Germany. The only novelty is that, besides the obvious, the boy reads to her. Perhaps teen lust is clouding his brain, for he seems not to realize, as we do rather quickly, that she is illiterate. This of course becomes a plot point later.

This early part of the movie was least compelling, but functions as setup to the rest. The plot details are best left unrevealed here, but given the setting, the nature of the revelations is easily guessed. What fascinates more is the question of how, having found out this information, one squares it with the kind lover of the first part. Director Stephen Daldry and screenwriter David Hare, as in their previous collaboration, The Hours, use the passage of time to make us reevaluate the characters. Winslet not only gets to age but also to play a character who seems sophisticated to the boy, but simple to the adult. Some have criticized the movie for making her character seem too sympathetic. Yet surely the whole point is that the viewer (or the reader, in the case of the Bernard Schlink novel from which this was adapted) get to decide whether she is sympathetic or not. This is the position in which the man finds himself; The Reader spends its last half as he wrestles to assess his relationship to the kind lover who could also be so thoughtlessly cruel.

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viewed 12/16/09 at Ritz Five (screening) and reviewed 4/18/09