Precious: Based on the Novel “Push” by Sapphire
Director: Lee Daniels
OSS 117 – Lost In Rio
Director: Michael Hazanavicius
The Book of Eli
Directors: Allen and Albert Hughes
The Princess and the Frog
Directors: Ron Clements, John Musker
Precious (Gabourey Sidibe), the ironically-named titular heroine of director Lee Daniels’s second film, Precious – Based on the Novel “Push” by Sapphire – is an overweight 16-year-old Harlem schoolgirl with one child who has severe developmental difficulties and another baby on the way. Her absentee biological father sexually abuses her – he shows up, does his business and goes away. Her mother, Mary (Mo’Nique), physically and psychologically abuses her, blaming her for taking her man, forcing her to carry out all chores and making sure she gets her welfare cheques. Boys in the street treat her as fair game – a pushover.
Precious’ only defence mechanism is a retreat into fantasy – bad things aren’t happening to her, she’s a star with a smart boyfriend. Her actual salvation of sorts is a special school for excluded girls. Precious’ teacher, Ms. Rain (Paula Patton), encourages her to keep a journal. Precious writes things down and learns to act in the real world, though a singular shocking act of violence by her mother is also a catalyst.
As a drama, Precious hits you in the gut – not once, not twice, but three times. It is the very definition of uncomfortable viewing. Not that namby-pamby stuff – children drawn to cruel behaviour; adults don’t do anything about it because they have not read any Freud. Precious makes you feel the effects of an inadequate diet – fatty foods, bad role models. It is supposed to make you partially uplifted by the end, though there is a final act whammy.
Yet Precious is also uncomfortable to watch, because it overtly manipulates your sympathies. Precious is not the only victim here. Mary is meant to be a horror. To me, she was an extremely troubled, possibly schizophrenic woman, as much in need of diagnosis and counselling by Precious’ social worker (Mariah Carey, scrubbed of make-up) as Precious herself. At one point, we watch Precious preparing a meal for her mother – a pig’s leg – then being forced to eat it all by herself while her mother watches television. We are supposed to think: Mary makes her fat because she wants her fat, thick and subservient, unable to think for herself’. Yet the film never truly examines Mary’s point of view.
Lee Daniels’ direction is slick and assured. I can certainly see the Dickensian appeal of the story. Yet I don’t trust it. The author was a teacher herself, who adapted the extreme aspects of her pupils’ experience – exploiting them by any other name. Sapphire has a hit novel. Sapphire has a hit movie. I’d be happier knowing that Sapphire used her success to help those who clearly fed it. That isn’t being precious. Rather, this is a pernicious portrayal of African-American lives.
The appeal of the French OSS 117 comedies is in the physical similarity between their star, Jean Dujardin, and the 1960s-era Sean Connery. The joke of both OSS 117 films – 2006’s Cairo, Nest of Spies and 2009’s Lost in Rio – is that the titular French secret service agent, Hubert Bonisseur de la Bath is a racist, sexist and imperialist idiot. He is a product of De Gaulle’s France, who somehow wins through by sheer bonhomie.
Comparisons can be drawn with Austin Powers and the Pink Panther films, but the film is less self-congratulatory than the former and more sophisticated and daring than the latter. In the opening scene, Hubert is surprised at a mountain retreat in Gstaad by a group of laughing Chinese Oddjob (from Goldfinger) lookalikes who open fire. The gun battle is absurd and cruel. Most of the women around Hubert die – except for his love interest – and no bullets touch him. Hubert does shoot his would-be assassin – a cue for a running joke in which various Chinese men approach him stating: “You killed my brother in Gstaad”. Hubert has no idea what they are saying.
Hubert’s mission is to go to Rio to buy a microfilm containing a list of French politicians who collaborated with the Nazis during the Second World War. “It’s a short list, that is why it is on a microfilm”,’ laughs Hubert. The grim joke is that Hubert is very wrong. A female Mossad agent, Dolores, assists him – a cue for dreary comments about her being his assistant, not suitable for spy work, and so on. Eventually, Hubert tracks down the head Nazi (Rüdiger Vogler) and has to overcome his fear of heights in a pastiche of both Trapeze and Vertigo.
Director Michael Hazanavicius does run some of his gags quite far. The best one involves Hubert borrowing both the spare clothes and the car of one character’s gardener – naturally it’s a tuxedo and a sports vehicle worthy of James Bond. There is an orgy scene in which Hubert’s heterosexuality is compromised and a good use of plans for a duck shaped paddleboat.
The most intriguing aspect of post-apocalyptic event drama The Book of Eli is the identity of the book that the sunglasses-wearing nomad, Eli (Denzel Washington), is humping around. Is it “The Celebrity Scientologist Phone Book” or Julia Childs’ Mastering the Art of French Cooking? Whatever it is, Eli is not going to hand it over to a rag-tag group of scavengers. He is prepared to kill to defend the book. A voice in his head told him to take it west, where presumably some Hollywood types would turn it into a movie.
What becomes clear is that the book is the only surviving copy of the King James Bible – well, so Eli says. People burned every other copy after “The Flash” – the apocalyptic event – the Eli tells the nominal female lead, Solara (Mila Kunis), who tends bar in one of the few communities he encounters. In this movie’s world, there are few people who lived pre-Flash. Most of them look like members of a biker gang who have not bothered to learn to read but ride around on motorcycles powered on goodness knows what and discharge the last remaining firearms.
To say that the world in The Book of Eli is incoherent is an understatement. Directors Allen and Albert Hughes are trying to make a point about the misuse of religious books – in the wrong hands they can be dangerous rallying texts. Hence the interest of the film’s nominal villain, Carnegie (Gary Oldman), who – for reasons never explained – believes in the existence of the book, but does not know who has it.
Oldman has played many screen villains before. Here he is coasting on his reputation, but you never believe that Carnegie would have a whole town in his grasp. The whole question of radioactivity after The Flash is never addressed. Neither do we find out how societies are re-organised. The Hughes brothers are content to use imagery from Westerns with a semi-comic interlude involving two cannibals (Michael Gambon and Frances de la Tour) thrown in.
I was unable to suspend disbelief in a world lazily cobbled together for the purpose of a few movie set pieces. Nor could I accept Washington as this kick-ass action hero, with a medium-sized sword somehow secreted in his nether regions. Washington’s record with science fiction is not great and this moderately graphic but ultimately underwhelming film about a Flash is fated to be panned.
In 1989, Disney released The Little Mermaid, a smarter, much more knowing animated family film than any before it in the genre, with a multicultural cast and a catchy calypso song, “Under the Sea”, that lingers in the memory more than the film itself. The Princess and the Frog, Disney’s first
hand-drawn animated film after a string of computer-animated ones represents a similar reinvention of the “classic’” Disney formula.
Set in 1930s New Orleans and freely adapted from The Frog Prince, it is billed as the first Disney animated film to feature an openly ethnic heroine. We can’t count Lilo from Lilo and Stitch, she’s Hawaiian, or Pocahontas, it seems.
African-American Tiana (voiced by Anika Noni Rose) is an ambitious waitress with two jobs working to save enough money to open her own restaurant. Into the port steams Prince Naveen (Bruno Campos), penniless royalty looking for a rich wife. The sinister local witch doctor – yes, there is another kind, lest the film be accused of negative stereotyping – Dr Facilier (Keith David) puts a curse on the gold-digging prince, turning him into a frog. Then Naveen persuades Tiana to kiss him and she turns into a frog as well.
Facilier’s plan is to have Naveen’s manservant impersonate Naveen in order to marry the mayor’s daughter. The bumbling servant will inherit her wealth, but Facilier will control him – and, by extension, all of New Orleans.
In the fairly generic quest that follows, Tiana and Naveen search for the nice Mama Odie (Jenifer Lewis), who can break the curse or at least offer practical advice and a musical number. There are songs by Pixar veteran Randy Newman. Although nothing as catchy or memorable as “You’ve Got a Friend in Me” from Toy Story, there are some fairly upbeat, narrative-progressing songs such as “Almost There” and “Need Some Help From The Other Side”.
There are the obligatory helpers, including a firefly in love with a star. And there is tragedy, too, because the film-makers acknowledge the necessity of cruelty in the Disney universe.
It is all fairly enjoyable entertainment for the Barack Obama era, although clearly engineered as such. There is nothing really groundbreaking, nor as whacky and creative as Cloudy With A Chance of Meatballs, my 12-year-old son’s favourite film of 2009, but The Princess and the Frog will put a smile on your face.
Patrick Mulcahy
