In American Fiction, an embittered black author, who is sick of having his highbrow material rejected by publishers and neglected by readers, writes a lurid pastiche of urban black life called My Pafology. He submits the new manuscript under a pseudonym. His object is to needle the industry with its own bad taste. And so, following the logic of The Producers, it sells.
This much is made clear in the trailer, which features a pull quote calling the film a “cinematic stick of dynamite.” The advertising emphasizes jokes at the expense of gullible white people whose self-righteous endorsement of representation masks deeply ingrained feelings of racial prejudice.
In a way, the trailer is as lurid as My Pafology, and more perceptive than the satirical elements in American Fiction. White liberals in 2024 are quick to reject negative stereotypes about people of color—but they are extremely credulous when it comes to negative stereotypes about themselves. White self-mortification is used as bait. But the switch is worth the swindle.
I was going batty trying to figure out who the star of Vision, Barbara Sukowa, reminded me of—and then, like a godsmack, it hit me: Louise Fletcher as Nurse Ratched. This is an odd affinity, considering that Sukowa is playing Hildegard of Bingen, the 12th-century Rhenish abbess whose resurgence has made strange bedfellows of Catholic, New Age, and feminist circles. (She was so ahead-of-her-time she was a Renaissance woman during the Middle Ages.) I’ll let Wikipedia fill you in on the bulk of her impressive C.V., but Hildegard believed herself to be the recipient of visions from the Almighty, which put her—in her own words, “a weak, unlearned woman”—in the good graces of the boy’s-club cognoscenti, enabling her to publish passels of treatises, correspondences, chorales, and one of the earliest extant morality plays. (Though even the prophet didn’t foresee that she’d get shout-outs from Oprah eight centuries after biting the dust.) If there’s a commonality between the loony-bin nurse and the comeback-kid nun, it’s imperiousness. Like botox, it renders your face too flaccid to project anything but an impersonal, intractable, “professional” demeanor: that “poised” look that makes medieval paintings so cold and creepy. I’m sure that under normal circumstances our ancestors were more wont to flash the “o face” than strike the blank poses in those pictures. But even if nuns were exceptions to that rule—there were no o’s for Hildy, as she’d be quick to point out—one goes to a biopic to see beyond the subject’s public persona, an impulse that isn’t entirely prurient. So the writer-director of Vision, Margarethe von Trotta, is stuck between a rock and a hard face.
Barring an imposture on the historical record, à la Tarantino, I could’ve used a little “blasphemy”: something suggestive, like the chaste alienation that Bresson brought to Diary of a Country Priest, or the sublimely abject teardrops that accumulated on Falconetti’s eyelashes in The Passion of Joan of Arc, or even the terror inherent in doubt in the much more recent Martyrs. Vision is a religious film that tries to circumvent religion. And since Hildegard left her personal life as one long lacuna, we feel at a double loss—like we’re watching the transcript of an official record, one calculated to not offend all those Catholics, New Agers, and feminists. It’s an unenviable position for any artist to be in, and a prison for both Sukowa and von Trotta, two grandees of the German New Wave. However, I think there were ways that they could’ve peeked through the bars of their self-imposed jail cell: themes that could’ve been developed without inciting excommunication. For starters, one misses the potentially meaningful contrast between a volunteer nun, like Richardis (the bright-eyed Hannah Herzsprung, a groupie with a girl-crush on her mother superior), and one whose aristocratic parents have pawned their eight-year-old off to a life of celibacy, like Hildegard. (Is there something more than adulation and daughterly love when the protégé embraces her tutor, who is not so easily given to spasms of enthusiasm?) When Richardis accepts a (politically motivated) appointment to become an abbess in her own right, Hildegard’s breakdown comes out of left field: There are no indications that she’d react this way; she’s no Charlie Sheen. (You’d think she’d become passive-aggressive and catty, scratch out Richardis’s innocent little heart—and ultimately come to regret it.)
Sukowa also bears a vague resemblance to Fletcher physically. Born in 1950—though you wouldn’t guess it—she’s an ageless beauty, even when she breaks free from her habit and reveals her long, golden ringlets. It’s a graceful, intelligent performance—but, mostly, it isn’t poignant. Her breakdown is one exception, despite the curveball it throws; there’s another one (undeveloped) when she sees the effect of a chain-mail chastity belt on her mentor’s corpse; and a big one, early on, when an illicitly pregnant younger nun supplicates the abbess, imploring her not to shear her, a black sheep, from her flock. Cooly sympathetic but servile to doctrine, Hildegard casts her out, prompting the poor girl to commit suicide; and the filmmaker intelligently cuts not to the visionary’s immediate reaction, but to her accusing the grouchy old abbott of abetting his horny monks, whose bad behavior is not as easy to trace as that of their female counterparts. But later, when Hildegard insists that God told her in a vision to move her nuns to their own convent, apart from the monks, one wonders if this move is politically motivated—a bone thrown to the skeptics in the audience? This seems especially fishy when she says that the new cloister is “conveniently located.” Nuns are homebodies, so convenient to what? To the places where Hildegard later goes on preaching tours—that’s what. Is Hildegard a modern career woman disguising herself as a pious servant of the Lord? This is an uncomfortably divisive question that the movie raises, yet avoids like the forthcoming plague.
Some people have the worst luck. Others are invented to have the worst luck. Such is the genesis of the title character in Precious: Based on the Novel Push by Sapphire. From that title alone, you know how importantly bad her luck is; the title needs a colonic. Produced under the aegis of Oprah Winfrey and Tyler Perry, the movie has been sold by way of scare tactics. For white critics, the story of an obese and embattled black teenager is just about untouchable; we see her raped by her father and savaged by her mother—with every gruesome detail slammed up in our grillz. The film is so oppressively persistent that it can only be called “honest.”
Responding to an inaudible question, the director, Lee Daniels, says—facetiously at first—that “…an African-American can only tell an African-American story … and I think that’s why [critics and audiences] understand [Precious]. I’m a black man, I can tell this story. Easy. … It was very hard for me to come back [from a string of critical and/or commercial failures] to try to please people like you.” Basically, if people don’t appreciate his artistry, they’re racist. And if they do, they’re racist. Easy. But during that same Q&A, Sapphire reveals that “[there] was no one [real-life] character that had all of Precious’s characteristics”—the heroine is a composite of several girls that the author encountered as a literacy teacher in the Bronx. May the fates bless people like Sapphire who’ve devoted their time to giving the underprivileged a voice and a means of escape. But the movie has taken her worst case scenario and branded it as the norm; they turn the worst case scenario into a girl that Oprah has seen “a million times … standing on the corner … waiting for the bus as I’m passing in my limo.” This girl who’s been “invisible” to Oprah—a woman who transcended her own dire upbringing—is being pawned off as the poster-child of urban black culture. It’s pure sensationalism, and it’s spit in black culture’s collective eye.
As there probably are a few people out there whose circumstances are as decrepit as Precious’s, this movie might have amounted to something if Daniels’s direction was genuinely sympathetic or genuinely inspirational. An Irish-Scotsman invoked an Indian hellscape in Slumdog Millionaire, but he gave it a bonkers élan that exploded through its overwrought setting—not to mention potential accusations of racism. The public schoolchildren in the Palme d’Or-winning The Class comprised a frenetically tossed ethnic salad. But that French film gave us insight into the lives of a handful of diverse and individualized Preciouses; and its director didn’t toy with the sort of flourishes that Daniels does. (When our heroine first crosses the threshold into her life-changing literacy course, must the classroom emit a heavenly glow?) The Class also crawled inside the sunken eyelids of a harried teacher, and showed us the toll that dealing with persnickety pupils took on him; here, Precious’s pedagogue (Paula Patton) is smiley and bland. When Ms. Rain chats with Precious at home, or starts to vent about the shaky relationship she has with her own mother, Daniels immediately dumps a voice-over track of Precious’s narration on top of it. Are we supposed to think that Precious is too scatterbrained to care about her devoted teacher or is Ms. Rain’s life too uninteresting to be important? (This is partly—if not satisfactorily—answered by Sapphire’s reply to the question “Did you have a secret for maintaining the voice and getting into the character of Precious?”: “The secret was to make all the other characters silent….”)
I doubt that Daniels—who often grapples with difficult subjects in his work—means to be insensitive. But how can one be sure? Take this sequence, for instance. Precious (who is played by the 26-year-old Gabourey Sidibe) brings her incest-produced newborn home to her mother, Mary (Mo’Nique), who didn’t even know that Precious was in the hospital. Mary tosses the baby on to the couch; assaults Precious—who Mary’s jealous of for usurping her rapist/boyfriend’s attentions; makes Precious, baby in arms, stumble down a staircase; and then nearly misses when she chucks a T.V. set—the one appliance she operates herself—at them. Precious shambles through the sere gray winterscape—her baby clutched to her chest—until she comes upon gospel singers who strike up her imagination. But before that can happen, Daniels has to focus on an advertisement for neutering—for happy, healthy animals. Is this supposed to function as satire or irony? Should this function as satire or irony?
Movie Monster 