Impressions Based on the Hype for the Movie Precious Based on the Novel Push by Sapphire | Scanners
Gabriel Cooper
Updated on March 09, 2026
For the longest time I avoided the reviews, too -- until October when a friend e-mailed me Ed Gonzales's scathing pan at Slant, and the hilarious phrase "your tongue hasn't clucked this much since 'Crash' (2005)" leapt out at me. It seemed to confirm my first impressions. And, no, I'm not going to pretend I'm immune to advertising, press coverage and word-of-mouth any more than anybody else is. The best I can do is to limit my exposure, but "Precious" rolled out over months -- first on the film festival circuit (and it played them all), then in limited release, a few cities at a time. By the time it got to my town, Seattle, in mid- to late-November, I'd broken down and read some of the most extreme praise and condemnation the movie had elicited. Here are a few comments I came across that stood out for me as the most provocative:
...Daniels emphasizes only the worst in human nature, and does so in a way that flatters rather than confronts the prejudices (and fetishes) of his liberal audience.
One for the Stuff White People Like canon, "Precious: Based on the Novel Push by Sapphire" is an impeccably acted piece of trash--an exploitation film that shamelessly strokes its audience's sense of righteous indignation.
David Edelstein, New York Magazine:
There are worst-case scenarios, and then there is Precious, who's in a hellish league of her own. The heroine and narrator of the novel Push by Sapphire (born Ramona Lofton), now a much-hyped film called "Precious: Based on the Novel Push by Sapphire," is the embodiment of everything--I mean, everything--American society values least and victimizes most. She's a poor, illiterate, morbidly obese, dark-skinned African-American girl. She was raped by her father from the age of 3, pregnant with his child at 12 (the baby, which she names Mongo, has severe Down syndrome), and then pregnant by him again at 16, when the novel begins. She's also sexually molested by her jealous, welfare-cheating, gross, and sedentary mother, although the genital fingering might seem preferable to the verbal and physical abuse. The book gives you quite a bludgeoning. I started to pull back from it in a flashback when the 12-year-old girl is in labor on the kitchen floor and her mother is kicking her in the face.
Precious is not an easy movie to watch, and there are people in the black community who wish that you wouldn't. They insist that it is yet another stereotypical, demonizing representation of black people. The other camp, however, is thrilled to see a depiction of a young African-American woman that, while heartbreaking, is a portrait of the black experience that has been overlooked on the sunny horizon that stretches from "The Cosby Show" to "House of Payne." Unfortunately, both of those reactions miss the movie's most searing message.[...]
I'm tired of movies presenting black people as grateful to find a helping hand to rise above their abusers. Not because we've seen this movie before -- starring Sidney Poitier, Michelle Pfeiffer, Hilary Swank, Morgan Freeman, and even Matthew Perry -- but because the story never changes.
