I just found out that Push, a new film by Philly-based producer/director Lee Daniels, won two top awards at this month’s prestigious Sundance Film Festival: Grand Jury Prize for U.S. dramas and the festival’s highest Audience Prize. Since the film has yet to find a distributor, I haven’t seen it, which means that I don’t quite know if such critical and popular praise is a good or bad thing.
Daniels is the unconventional filmmaker responsible for helping to create provocative and disturbing independent films such as Monster’s Ball (famous for Halle Berry’s controversial sex scene with Billy Bob Thornton) and The Woodsman (which boasts Kevin Bacon’s riveting and sympathetic portrayal of a pedophile). Shadowboxer, his 2005 directorial debut, was most cited for its incestuous interracial sex scenes (between Cuba Gooding, Jr., and Helen Mirren). But I own a copy of that movie simply to show people its bizarrely unexplained (and matter-of-fact) depictions of a suburban Philadelphia seemingly awash in pet Zebras.
In all of his films, Daniels pushes the envelope. He usually rips and defaces it, too.
His newest film, Push, is based on a novel from the late 1990s by poet Sapphire, a story that is fecund ground for Lee Daniels’s iconoclastic and contentious filmmaking.
I used to teach the Sapphire book to undergraduates when I was an adjunct faculty member at the College of New Rochelle’s Rosa Parks Campus in Harlem, New York. It is the first-person story of a poor, abused, HIV-positive teenage mother named Precious Jones who has to negotiate a cruel and unforgiving Harlem landscape. Precious writes her own story, which means that she spells things phonetically and idiosyncratically, usually providing just enough for us to decipher and translate her misnomers and mispronunciations. For instance, she calls her first daughter (a child she conceived as a function of being raped by her own father at 12 years old) Little Mongo, and she explains how her baby got that nickname. It is “short for Mongoloid Down Sinder, which is what she is; sometimes what I feel I is. I feel so stupid sometimes. So ugly, worth nuffin.” Down Sinder is, of course, Down Syndrome, and we read the book with the tragically absolute knowledge that Precious and her Little Mongo have nary a chance in this cold, mean world.
I taught the book to adult learners from Harlem, and they really embraced the narrative as a concerted attempt to speak small, ephemeral truths to the deafening constraints of power. These were working class twentysomethings and thirtysomethings who had full-time jobs, their own children to support at home, and just enough energy left over to go after the undergraduate degrees that society would have expected them to earn many years earlier. Some did care for children with Down Syndrome or other serious diseases, and they all seemed to understand the book (identifying with its assertive narrator) in truly inspiring ways.
I taught Sapphire’s book in Harlem in the late 1990s, but I haven’t had the courage to teach it since. Not at Harvard. Not at Duke. And not at the University of Pennsylvania. My fear is that other students wouldn’t be as able to identity with Precious, to read her as one of them, as fully human. The book might just as easily get redeployed as yet another glaring example of stereotypical black female pathology and used to bolster claims about African-American cultural dysfunction, self-serving claims that would end more conversations than they would cultivate.
I know why Daniels would be drawn to such a story. It is gritty, honest, and powerful. And he has enlisted a peculiar cast (including comedienne Mo’Nique, singers Lenny Kravitz and Mariah Carey, and newcomer Gabourey Sidibe) that is said to have proffered some unforgettable performances. I don’t doubt that. And I also trust that Daniels has helped them to craft humanizing portrayals. I just hope that diverse audiences respond to the film in ways that are productive and proactive, not reactionary and narrow-minded.
