Friday, November 20, 2009

Prejudices about "Precious"

My brain has been cluttered with a few obsessive thoughts for the past two days, which I'm trying to offload here:

I feel pressured to see "Precious." I will see it, mostly because I can't go on saying to anyone who'll listen that I think it's probably terribly critically overrated without seeing it. But here is what I predict will be disappointing about the movie:

1. The fact that it might be good for people to see this movie doesn't mean it's a good movie. What leads me to think that the movie is overrated is that it has the hallmark of a chronically overrated movie, namely, it's a picture that critics think is (morally) important for audiences to see. In this case, it's because the protagonist is a person whose "voice" is not heard in our society, whose image is buried, whose life is systematically hidden from view. This doesn't make for a good movie; even if it achieves the purpose of somehow voicing the voice of the voiceless, that makes for a good piece of propaganda (albeit a laudable kind of propaganda). Which is to say...

2. It's not going to be art. Or more precisely, it's going to be missing what I'm pretty certain is a cardinal virtue of art: raising new questions that the artist/audience does not know, or does not purport to know, the answer to.

3. It's not going to be artful. "Raw" and "naturalistic", which are being used as compliments in the reviews I've seen, can be code for "artless depiction of someone whom I don't know anything about". By 'artless' I mean: the particular depiction of the events in the movie does not reveal anything important which wouldn't be evident in any other representation of those events.

2 comments:

Just A Patriot said...

How was this movie??

bc said...

I'm a schmuck--I haven't seen it yet! But I have seen "Up in the Air" (which is a good conversation-starter) and "Avatar" (which isn't).