Precious

I've wanted to see this film for a long time--ever since I listened to an NPR segment about it on a road trip forever ago.

Precious was really well done. The actress who plays Precious has to play wildly different roles in the actual Precious and the Precious of her imagination. The dramatization of her imagination was very effective and well-acted. Although I will say, the film's use of fading was super weird--I suppose it was effective at blurring the lines between truth and fiction as I got pretty confused at one point whether the hot male nurse (of Grey's Anatomy fame--this is the third thing I've seen him play a nurse in) was real or a fantasy.

The story itself is incredibly moving--the abuse that Precious faces is unfathomable. She forms a close relationship with a teacher in an alternative school. When she gets pregnant with her second child, her teacher, not totally unreasonably, suggests that she put her child up for adoption so that she can keep learning to read and write. Precious decides that she wants to take care of her child while continuing to learn. It is remarkable, in the face of massive, debilitating abuse by her mother and father, that Precious is so committed to taking care of her own children. In fact, she gets back her firstborn back, who has Down Syndrome, so that she can take care of her as well.

I met a girl once who is a nurse in Philadelphia. She works with mothers who need help raising their children. She does everything that she can so that the children can stay with their mothers. I never really thought about this before--adoption is clearly a better option than abortion, but this girl argued that it is best for children to be with their birth mothers, if those birth mothers can, with help, raise them.


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