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 ghetto 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?

And then there’s simple ineptitude. I’ve never seen Vittorio De Sica’s Italian film Two Women, but—whatever the thematic import—I don’t think it’s something that Precious’s family would watch, in subtitles, on the tube. (I thought at first it was Federico Fellini’s Nights of Cabiria, which is also about a particularly unlucky lady.) There’s also the case of Precious reading aloud in class—and then suddenly in labor at a hospital, with a black man shushing her as she screams. Is this a flashback? Is that her baby’s father (and not her own)? It all remains unclear until she’s in a hospital room with her classmates; the jerk who chastised her is supposedly a sympathetic nurse. (Yelling at a woman during childbirth only makes a winsome first impression if you’re played by Lenny Kravitz.) Finally, during a dreamy sequence, Precious spins through civil-rights footage—Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, all the way up to Tiananmen Square. This is supposed to be what she’s learning, I guess—but in a class that teaches her how to read and write? (Not that this would make much sense anyway. That famous video of a protester confronting a tank at Tiananmen Square is from 1989; the movie is set in 1987.)

Daniels may not know what he’s saying, but he’s saying it with so much force that enthusiasts can’t help but fawn over his entropy. We’re supposed to be inspired by this girl who goes from not knowing the word “at” to boasting a reading level that’s eighth-grade and climbing. Given her circumstances, that certainly is an achievement. But, in the end, when this 17-year-old is walking through mean streets with two young children (one of whom has Down syndrome) that she can’t support, and the whole triad is probably H.I.V.-positive thanks to their late father-grandfather (who’s succumbed to the disease), are we meant to feel her triumph? She’s learned to read, she’s learned to write, but now she’s poised to die of AIDS—and nothing the system has done can save her. With her book, Sapphire wished to convey “[the] power of intervention in a human being’s life … While I show a very destroyed family system I also show an extended family that rises up to help Precious. When one structure has fallen another appears.” Perhaps her temperament is simply more sanguine than mine: “Right now [1996] we have people who are living with [H.I.V.] symptom free for 10-15 years after diagnosis, so with information and preventive health care we don’t have to have a medical disaster.” Chin up, Precious!

Geoffrey Fletcher’s dialogue is probably heavily indebted to Push, but it’s fluent and naturalistic; it doesn’t preserve epigrams in amber like Invictus did. But only Precious’s cast lives up to the hype. Sidibe’s affect sometimes seems flat, but she has a playful aura that counts for a lot, and no shortage of richness and gravity in her dramatic scenes—of which there are a lot. The actresses playing her classmates also seem authentic, even if we don’t really get to know them. But Mariah Carey unleashes a surprising, scene-stealing toughness in her few scenes as Precious’s social worker; she has the wary firmness of having been around the block. Her dogged force and presence here may amount to a career rebirth—and this baby will hopefully not be so addled as the others in this film. It’s Mo’Nique, however, who really steals the show. For most of the movie, she’s just crazy-bitch mama, but I could feel in my shivering bones why a daughter would submit to this couch-potato Medusa. When Mary breaks down in the end, we see that this is a woman who’s lost all the things that she’s never really had. Mo’Nique explained to the audience at Sundance that she played that scene as if unveiling Mary’s mental illness; even if her character is never quite redeemed for her cruel behavior, the actress hopes that viewers’ hearts would be “lightened up.” Apart from envy, the movie never offers an explanation for Mary’s unending supply of violent bitchiness; we don’t even know her history. But Mo’Nique gives this wench some semblance of humanity.

In its own ways, the promotion for Precious is as shrewd as it is for Avatar, which—budget-wise—is as portly as our fried-chicken-fed protagonist. On the one hand, rape, incest and abuse are as cinematically attractive as a train wreck; on the other, nobody wants to criticize a “realistic” tale from the ghetto because nobody wants to be called racist. But, whatever the filmmakers’ intentions, a charge of racism could easily be leveled at this movie for exploiting the worst stereotypes about black people and the poor. There are certainly a lot of troubled people in these communities; and the disparity issues that enmeshed individuals like Precious suffer through may sometimes seem at a terribly far remove from society at large. Movies have the power to bridge this gap. But is it right to exhibit this lifestyle—a result of several factors that the movie doesn’t take into account—as a living hell for middle-class audiences to gawk at? And only in return for a cheap “inspirational” ending that hints that Precious is as delusional as she’s ever been? Precious may be the spitting image of a few very unfortunate souls out there; but this film is, in an important sense, reactionary. If anything, it demonstrates the failure of the welfare state. It seems bent on proving that President Reagan was right to condemn single mothers.