Comparative Film Review: Precious vs. Happiness: The Fine Line Between "Well-Done" and "Poorly-Done" Disturbing Films

Recently I watched the 2009 award-winning film Precious on Netflix for a mid-week thought-provoking movie.  It definitely fulfilled it’s purpose in provoking lots of thoughts but not the kind that I was expecting.  I had been warned that it was a disturbing film and that it carried a lot of heavy content.  This was not an exaggeration at all.  I was not prepared for this kind of disturbing, however.    

(SPOILER ALERT: if you don’t want the film Precious ruined for you, don’t read this review.  However, because I value Happiness so much, I would never dream of spoiling that film so rest assured that you can read on without fear that I am ruining it for you). The film Precious is a Geoffrey S. Fletcher adaptation of the 1996 novel Push by Sapphire.  It is about an obese, illiterate, impoverished African-American teenage mom named Claireece Precious Jones who grows up in Harlem in the 1980s and the struggles and trials that she has to overcome in order to build a normal life.  The film starts out by immediately diving into the abusive home situation that Precious was born into and has lived in for 16 years and how this has drastically affected her ability to learn at an already low-performance, inner-city public school.  As the film progresses the viewer learns even more about just how twisted and abusive Precious’ home life is.  She is 16 years old and already a mother of a 2 year old toddler and she is now pregnant again--both times by her own abusive father.

While this film is indeed very disturbing content-wise from the get-go, what I found to be far more disturbing (and even unsettling) was the execution and the presentation of the content.  Instead of letting the disturbing content organically expose itself or be appropriately woven into the plot of the story, it was shoved in the viewer’s face and even showcased.  In fact, the way that Precious‘ deeply disturbing circumstances are presented is so over-the-top that it’s almost comical (disturbingly so).  It’s as if you can almost hear Bob Barker or some other cheesy game show host announcer saying: “And now ladies and gentlemen, we have Precious Jones up for the 2009 Victim of the Year Award!  Not only is she fat and black and dark-skinned and ugly but she is also completely illiterate/stupid and a mother of two children, fathered by her own father whom she has been raped by since infancy...isn’t that just TERRIBLE?!...Oh my! And just when you thought she couldn’t have it any worse...she has AIDS too! Oh my! Ding ding ding! Ladies and Gentlemen we have a winner!!! Congratulations Precious Jones you win the 2009 Victim of the Year Award! Woooo hooooo!!!”

By the end of the film, I was not only disgusted by the content and the presentation of the film but I was actually offended as well.  I’m not even black but I honestly found this film to be very race-biased.  Every black character in the film was either a wicked and evil child-molesting animal or a hopeless and miserable victim and all of the “good guys” in the film were either white or very light-skinned, well-educated, non-ebonics-speaking blacks who did not live in black neighborhoods.  This film honestly did not portray a single positive attribute among normal, medium to dark-skinned, inner-city black folks and it did not give them much of a hopeful message either other than: if you’re life sucks, leave home and find some charitable white people or black people who are similar to white people to help transform your life for you.

As much as I deplored this film, however, I am glad that I watched it because it forced me to think about what it is that makes a disturbing film well-done and what is it that makes a disturbing film poorly-done.  It is a fine line that determines the quality of a disturbing film but this line definitely exists.  In oder to help define this line, let’s look at a highly disturbing film that I consider very well-done--one of my all-time favorites, the 1998-dark comedy directed by Todd Solondz, Happiness.

Happiness is one of the most disturbing films I have ever seen.  It looks at the interconnected lives of three sisters, their families, and those around them--all seemingly very typical, everyday American people--and uncovers a slew of very dark and twisted issues pertaining to emotional and sexual abuse that lurk beneath the surface.  However, instead of trying to earnestly address every issue that is brought up, like Precious attempts to do, it merely makes light of them and laughs at them.  Disturbing?  Definitely.  Effective?  Definitely.  

In Happiness, there are numerous occasions where the viewer doesn’t know whether he is supposed to laugh, cry, scream or all three at the same time. In doing so, the director makes such a disturbing impact upon the audience that they can’t help but think about the film for weeks afterward, questioning every preconceived notion that they’ve ever had about the perfect all-American family.  Precious, on the other hand, does nothing but reinforce and strengthen already-existing negative pathologies.  It does nothing to break outside the box or force the audience to think, it just exaggerates every negative conception of black Americans that the audience already had.  Kind of like, “Oh yea, I guess it really is that bad...that’s sad,” and then go back to their everyday lives even less motivated to help out the poor and oppressed because they now think their efforts will be completely ineffective.  

Similar to Precious, the intensity and the quantity of the disturbing elements found in Happiness is way-over-the-top and way too much to take in at once.  It’s so much that it feels forced and unnatural, even manipulative.  But the difference here between Precious and Happiness is that Happiness is a comedy and Precious definitely is not.  As disturbing as it may sound, I actually think that that Precious would have been so much more effective if it was produced, similarly, as a really dark and morbidly twisted comedy.  This would have allowed the director to draw the audience’s attention to Precious’ horrific circumstances but in a way that was digestible and more appropriate with the over-the-top presentation.  

As the film was, it took on way too much content and it took itself way too seriously.  It could have been a decent film if it focused in on one aspect of her disturbing upbringing, say the incest or the illiteracy and dissected it, but when you just keep on accumulating the tragedies, it cheapens them and doesn’t allow the audience to digest them properly.  There is just too much.  The film could’ve been nine hours long and it still would not have been able to effectively address all of the issues brought up.  Precious should be used as case study number one why attempting to take on all the content of a very deep book and condensing it into one 110-minute film never works.

In the end, Precious failed miserably at capturing my empathy or even my sympathy for the life of Claireece Precious Jones.  After watching it, I only had sympathy for Geoffrey S. Fletcher who, it appears, is completely incapable of turning a beautiful, heart-wrenching story about a teenage girl who overcomes the unimaginable and beyond to build a life for herself, into a halfway decent film.  I have never understood artists’ collective aversion to the cliche more vividly than after I watched this film.  The inability of the director to break away from obvious cliches is not only painful but it is lazy. What Fletcher produced was a mockery of the original story and it would have been more effective if the tone of the movie was a mockery as well.