More on Lee Daniels

I have to admit that I'm getting excited about Lee Daniels' The Butler. Whew! It looks terrible and, like I said before, it just may be Socially Significant enough that the critics will give it a pass.

The main problem with Daniels is that he has no sense of humor. The only light-hearted part of Precious was a scene about stealing fried chicken, a scene that prompted these questions: Are we supposed to like that Precious is stealing? Does a girl that dangerously obese need to eat a whole box of fried chicken? And fried chicken?

Daniels has tried to compensate for his lack of humor by being Important. He doesn't seem to understand how people relate to one another--see his directorial debut Shadowboxer.  That film, like the reports of The Paperboy, is ridiculous on paper and boring on celluloid. Let me sum up: It's the story of a May-December, interracial romance between two contract killers who help raise a child. If Daniels hoped to say something Important about human relationships, he jacked up the absurdity factor so high that there's nothing real between the characters.

I think of Precious the same way I think of Kids. Kids was cause for much hand-wringing; "What has happened to our children?" But it was simple exploitation, part of a chain that stretched all the way from the first teenager films through Little Foxes to Thirteen and Harmony Korine's Spring Breakers today. Precious also purports to tell what's "really happening" in the inner city.

I find Precious to be a lot of fun to think about. The main character has so many catastrophes pile upon her that, when it's revealed that she's contracted HIV as a result of being raped by her father, one throws one's hands up and says, "There's nothing left that can happen to this poor girl." The big ending is that Mariah Carey, as a social worker, tells off Precious' mother and makes her feel bad; it's wholly unsatisfying but, on the other hand, what could possibly happen to Precious that would make things look brighter?

That the film earned Best Picture and Best Director nods shows just how alienated Hollywood is from the real world. I imagine they were so wowed by showing the first big-budget depiction of people dining on pigs' feet that they imagined that they'd found a window into the ghetto. So much so that they completely ignored all the incompetence they take Tyler Perry to task for.