..Gary Dretzka
..Noah Forrest
..Leonard Klady
..David Poland
..Douglas Pratt
..Ray Pride
..Kim Voynar
..Michael Wilmington

Push
Directed by Lee Daniels

In school or just walking down the street, people see Precious from the outside -- a grossly overweight, pregnant black teenager -- and make judgements about her: she's irresponsible because she's pregnant with her second child at the age of 16, she's stupid because she's 16 and still in junior high, she's fat because she doesn't control her eating.

What they don't see is Precious on the inside: she's pregnant with her second child at the age of 16 because her mostly-absentee father, who also fathered her first child, a Down's Syndrome-afflicted daughter named Mongol, rapes her. She's still in junior high and illiterate, despite an obvious aptitude for math, because the public school system has failed to recognize and help her with her learning disability, giving As in English to a girl who can't read her way through Dick and Jane. She's grossly overweight because her jealous mother has overfed her since childhood to keep her fat and unattractive.

With Push (adapted from the novel of the same name by controversial poet Sapphire based on her on experiences as a teacher in a Harlem alternative school), director Lee Daniels explores some tough ideas about invisibility, abuse, incest, poverty, and illiteracy. Precious is largely invisible to the larger world. At school, Precious sits at the back of the room and doesn't answer questions; at home, she tries not to do anything to set off her volatile, abusive mother, Mary (Mo'Nique). When something bad happens, Precious disappears inside her head into a fantasy world where she's famous and a handsome, smiling young man holds out his hand to her and kisses her.

Nobody sees any potential in Precious to be anything more than another drain on the welfare system until, suspended from school for being pregnant again, Precious winds up at an alternative school called Each One Teach One, where she meets Ms. Rain (Paula Patton), the first person in Precious' life to ever believe in her.

In Ms. Rain's class, Precious sits at the front of the room for the first time and connects with other teens who've had lives as rough as her own. Ms. Rain pushes her to push herself, and through her new friendships and learning to write in a journal, Precious starts to discover the strength and beauty that her parents and life had nearly beaten out of her.

In her novel, Sapphire doesn't pull any punches with laying out the blame for the plight of Precious and those like her who've fallen through the cracks of society; Precious knows what society thinks of her: "Don't nobody want me. Don't nobody need me ... ugly black grease spot to be wipe away, punish, kilt, changed,finded a job." And until she comes to Each One Teach One, that's all she thinks of herself; how could a 16-year-old girl be expected to think otherwise, with a mother who unleashes a constant barrage of physical and verbal abuse, telling Precious she's fat, ugly, stupid, worthless, with or without the slightest provocation.

Daniels largely conveys the messages of the source material: while Sapphire doesn't necessarily excuse poverty and race as factors in how a life like Precious' could happen, she seems to also grant significant weight to the more controversial idea that the absence of fathers and matriarchal structure prevalent in poor black communities has an impact as well. Interestingly, while many black scholars have argued against this theory, most notably laid out in the Labor Department's Moynihan Report, our president-elect has alluded to similar issues around the absence of fathers in the black community, which might help the message at the heart of Push get a better reception than it would have had it been adapted soon after it was written in 1996.

Daniels added his own stamp to the story in adapting for the screen, giving more weight to certain characters like Nurse John, who befriends Precious when she has her second baby, and incorporating the dream-like fantasy sequences that permeate the film. While these interwoven scenes can make the tone of the film feel somewhat schizophrenic, I appreciate that Daniels faced a challenging task in adapting material that is frequently too raw for the screen, and sought to find a way to convey the sense of escaping into fantasy that many abuse victims develop as an escape mechanism; it just doesn't always work here.

This is a difficult film to watch at times. The violence and anger emanating from Mary when she lays into Precious over and over again starts to make you feel beaten down yourself; it serves to create a strong sense of empathy with the lead character, though some may find the relentless pounding of the waves of Mary's anger and jealousy emotionally manipulative.

As Precious, newcomer Gabourey Sidibe does quite a good job of portraying a challenging character. Though some may find her performance flat and unemotional, the context of her character is that she's a girl who's been beaten down, both literally and metaphorically, her entire life; Precious is like a turtle retreated in a shell to protect herself, her gait shuffles, her affect is flat -- all accurate characteristics of a profoundly depressed and traumatized person.

Daniels fleshes out his cast by playing against type and expectation, furthering the film's message about judgment. Songstress and glamour-girl Mariah Carey is cast as a dowdy social worker, The View host Sherri Shepherd plays Cornrows, the school secretary, singer Lenny Kravitz plays the kindly Nurse John and comedian Mo'Nique portrays Mary, the monster mother. Mo'Nique's performance in particular drives much of the film, as she whirls around Precious like a ravaging hurricane, battering her with a never-ending stream of abuse.

Daniels has a powerful, evocative film in Push, though it would benefit from some tightening in the editing room, but the film is going to be tough to market, unless someone can figure out a brilliant way to pitch this raw, dark film to both white suburban moviegoers and the black audiences who see Tyler Perry's films to the tune of millions of dollars. Otherwise, it might not garner more than just acclaim on the fest andarthouse circuit.

- Kim Voynar

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