"The author presents her protagonist's circumstances as unrelenting," says a teacher with the unlikely name of Blu Rain in "Precious: Based on the Novel 'Push' by Sapphire," which expands into Memphis and other cities today after breaking per-theater box-office records the past two weeks in limited release.

The teacher's phrase -- almost as cumbersome as the movie's title (changed from the original "Push" to avoid confusion with the recent Chris Evans/Dakota Fanning action film of the same name) -- is director Lee Daniels' way of acknowledging that his hulking title heroine, Claireece Precious Jones, is the victim of enough abuse, misuse and bad circumstance to shock the writer of even the most overwrought melodramas of the past.

Anne Marie Fox/Lionsgate

Gabourey Sidibe stars as Claireece Precious Jones in "Precious: Based on the Novel 'Push' by Sapphire."

Precious

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Rated R for child abuse including sexual assault, and pervasive language

Length: 109 minutes

Released: November 6, 2009 Limited

Cast: Mo'Nique, Paula Patton, Mariah Carey, Sherri Shepherd, Lenny Kravitz

Director: Lee Daniels
Producer: Lee Daniels, Sarah Siegel-Magness, Gary Magness,
Writer: Damien Paul, Sapphire
Genre: Drama
Distributor: Lionsgate Films

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Precious (played by newcomer Gabourey Sidibe) is an obese, basically illiterate, sexually abused, welfare-dependent, 16-year-old junior high student with a Down syndrome daughter and another child on the way; both pregnancies were caused by her father.

At one point, Precious' evil welfare cheat of a mother, Mary (played by Mo'Nique, an almost certain Best Supporting Actress Oscar-winner), attempts to drop a television on her daughter's head after Precious and her baby roll down several flights of tenement stairs. "Don't nobody want you," mom shouts at Precious. "I shoulda aborted you."

In a variation on the old Borscht belt routine about the food not only being bad but coming in small portions, Mary criticizes her daughter's cooking, complaining that the pigs' feet are too hairy to eat and, anyway, "how am I supposed to eat pigs' feet with no collard greens?"

Set in Harlem in 1987, "Precious" has been both wildly overpraised and unfairly maligned since its debut this year at the Sundance Film Festival, where it earned the top awards in drama, the Audience Award and the Grand Jury Prize.

Armond White, the reliably contrarian African-American reviewer for the New York Press, hyperventilated that "not since 'The Birth of a Nation' has a mainstream movie demeaned the idea of black American life as much as 'Precious.'" He called it a work of "racist hysteria," notwithstanding the fact that almost everyone associated with the project -- from original novelist Sapphire, to director Daniels, to screenwriter Geoffrey Fletcher, to celebrity "executive producers" Oprah Winfrey and Tyler Perry (who became affiliated with the film after its production) -- is black.

If that response seems overwrought, there's no denying that Daniels -- producer of the similarly racially provocative "Monster's Ball" -- revels in almost cartoonish debasement and absurdly grotesque imagery. (In one scene, Mo'Nique lifts her arms to reveal pointedly hairy pits while dancing to disco music in a skintight leotard in front of a TV that is silently broadcasting "The $10,000 Pyramid.") But Sapphire's story and the film's performances are powerful enough to compensate for Daniels' miscalculations and phony visual tricks. (Even a conversation between two people seated in chairs is shot with sudden zooms and camera adjustments, a fake-documentary approach that makes no sense when there's no action for the camera to react to.)

What "Precious" does well is to create sympathy and understanding for its title character, who is certainly one of the more unique heroines in movie history. The movie at times feels like a particularly intense "ABC After School Special," as Precious' interaction with the almost angelic Ms. Rain (Paula Patton) and a sympathetic social worker (a de-glammed Mariah Carey) help the girl pull herself from desperation to the brink of self-sufficiency. (The book, which told its story entirely through Precious' voice, was more convincing; onscreen, the fantasy sequences, in which Precious imagines herself as a pop star or a blond white girl, seem projections of Daniels' imagination rather than the girl's.)

"Precious" seems to condemn the welfare state for institutionalizing indolence, but it functions almost as a public service announcement for the need for social service agencies, bootstrap initiatives and public education programs, such as Each One-Teach One. "Precious" may win Oscars, but its true legacy may be in inspiring people to become social workers or to take advantage of educational opportunities.

-- John Beifuss: 529-2394