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The floral mural behind the dirt, the chocolate inside the gold coin. Blossom of a smile, as the poetess would say, "the ugliest this side of Creation" endures in début de siècle rural Georgia. A catalog of abuse for the Black teenager (Desreta Jackson), raped by her stepfather, separated from her children, given away to a widowed brute (Danny Glover). She grows up with a twinkle dancing in her timorous eyes, Whoopi Goldberg like Gelsomina in braids. "I don't know how to fight. All I know how to do is stay alive." Her lights are the beloved sister (Akosua Busia) who pleads to write after being banished from the household, and the spangled chanteuse (Margaret Avery) who helps her with the Sapphic side of her emancipation. Stomping in and out is the bold daughter-in-law (Oprah Winfrey), who pays dearly for her pride though not before dispensing conjugal-spiritual advice to the heroine: "You should bash Mister's head open and think about Heaven later." Alice Walker's book needed Julie Dash and instead got Steven Spielberg at his most insistently bouncy, set on proving a new maturity yet concerned about ruining the audience's evening. (A transformative carnal encounter pans discreetly to wind chimes, a rebellious wallop is obscured by a passing jalopy.) Sweep swamps intimacy, a patch will not do when a whole field can choke the eyes, the escape hatch of slapstick is never far off... and a transcendent poignancy floods the screen all the same. As with Scorsese in Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore, the shift to melodrama heightens emotion and lyricizes form. The hidden treasure of sororal correspondence, a musicality unloosened to bridge juke joint and chapel, the words of self-actualization made flesh. "Dear God, I'm here." No more fitting punishment for those calling for "realism" than Daniels' Precious. Cinematography by Allen Daviau. With Adolph Caesar, Rae Dawn Chong, Willard Pugh, Dana Ivey, Laurence Fishburne, Carl Anderson, John Patton Jr., Bennet Guillory, and Leonard Jackson.
--- Fernando F. Croce |