Blindside and Precious
Blindside and Precious
Two movies having to do with African Americans caught in situations of extreme poverty were up for best picture at the Academy Awards this year: Precious and Blindside. Neither won, though in my opinion Precious should have. (But I saw only 5 of the 10 nominated films.)
Both Precious and Blindside are fine movies but completely different in style. Blindside is a typical Hollywood movie, by which I mean, a movie that takes a true story and cleans it up into a slick, clean comfortable feel-good tale that allows rich, white, Christians and Southerners to feel good about themselves. Precious, in contrast, is a journey into the life of a young African-American girl who has been sexually abused by her father and experiences daily the most putrid kind of verbal abuse from her mother. The language, of the mother especially, is so violent and profane that it scalds your heart.
Blindside seems to say that if once in a while wealthy whites would pick an African American kid out of the gutter and take him home to live with them, what a wonderful world this would be. Precious seems to say that situations of chronic welfare dependency and poverty can lead to terribly destructive abuse of a child, but that the child can be rescued and empowered by teachers and social workers and church people from within the African American community. One movie is slick and smooth and shows us wealthy white folk rescuing a down and out African American male. The other is jagged and fraught with wretchedness but shows us the title character finding hope within the struggling community. One, Blindside, is a true story that has been slightly fictionalized . The other is a fiction that speaks truth with immense power. Blindside reminds us that individual acts of kindness can have powerful and long-lasting effects; Precious reminds us that we have deep, unsolved problems with racial, sociological and economic causes that get lost and forgotten in a culture dominated by middle class concerns.
Blindside ran in Sioux Center (by my unofficial observation) for about six weeks. Precious, as far as I know, never made it to the Sioux Center theatre though it was released in November of 2009.Both movies end on positive notes, but the hope in Precious is far more tenuous than in Blindside. I suspect Blindside was so popular in my home town because most people want the movies they watch to make them feel good. Precious does not quite let you feel good as you walk out into the light. You leave knowing that all is not well in the land of the poor and disenfranchised.
Two movies having to do with African Americans caught in situations of extreme poverty were up for best picture at the Academy Awards this year: Precious and Blindside. Neither won, though in my opinion Precious should have. (But I saw only 5 of the 10 nominated films.)
Both Precious and Blindside are fine movies but completely different in style. Blindside is a typical Hollywood movie, by which I mean, a movie that takes a true story and cleans it up into a slick, clean comfortable feel-good tale that allows rich, white, Christians and Southerners to feel good about themselves. Precious, in contrast, is a journey into the life of a young African-American girl who has been sexually abused by her father and experiences daily the most putrid kind of verbal abuse from her mother. The language, of the mother especially, is so violent and profane that it scalds your heart.
Blindside seems to say that if once in a while wealthy whites would pick an African American kid out of the gutter and take him home to live with them, what a wonderful world this would be. Precious seems to say that situations of chronic welfare dependency and poverty can lead to terribly destructive abuse of a child, but that the child can be rescued and empowered by teachers and social workers and church people from within the African American community. One movie is slick and smooth and shows us wealthy white folk rescuing a down and out African American male. The other is jagged and fraught with wretchedness but shows us the title character finding hope within the struggling community. One, Blindside, is a true story that has been slightly fictionalized . The other is a fiction that speaks truth with immense power. Blindside reminds us that individual acts of kindness can have powerful and long-lasting effects; Precious reminds us that we have deep, unsolved problems with racial, sociological and economic causes that get lost and forgotten in a culture dominated by middle class concerns.
Blindside ran in Sioux Center (by my unofficial observation) for about six weeks. Precious, as far as I know, never made it to the Sioux Center theatre though it was released in November of 2009.Both movies end on positive notes, but the hope in Precious is far more tenuous than in Blindside. I suspect Blindside was so popular in my home town because most people want the movies they watch to make them feel good. Precious does not quite let you feel good as you walk out into the light. You leave knowing that all is not well in the land of the poor and disenfranchised.
"Precious" did make it to Denver and is one of the few movies I've seen in a theater the past few years. "Enjoyable" is likely not the right word to describe the experience, but it is some phenomenal story telling
ReplyDeleteGood post, pops. I think the power of Precious is in its gritty reality, in that it doesn't shrink from showing us how terrible things can be. The hope it presents at the end, though tenuous, is all the more powerful for it. Blindside is just a little too easy from start to finish. In my opinion.
ReplyDeleteI understand and appreciate what you are saying. But maybe Blindside stayed in Sioux Center because it's a good family film. I didn't see Precious, but I don't think it is the kind of movie I could take my 11-year-old daughter and 9-year-old son to.
ReplyDeleteYet watching Blindside as a family caused us to have a conversation and question ourselves. How willing would our Christian family be to open our doors to a stranger...to act as Jesus would want us to act? That's the challenge I was left with after watching The Blindside.
Did it make me feel good? Sure. It also left me looking for opportunties to make a difference. If it is slick and appeals to the masses, and then left them feeling the same way -- I say good!