Precious: Based on the Novel 'Push' By Sapphire

Sundancers swooned, awarding it three prizes, a record. And the hard-to-please Cannes crowd paid tribute with a 15-minute standing ovation. Oprah and Tyler Perry love it. Customarily sober critics have gone gaga, calling it inspirational, soulful, Oscar-worthy; others, equally passionate, slam it as hateful exploitation. Hardly anyone is lukewarm or indifferent to "Precious: Based on the novel 'Push' by Sapphire," the controversial movie that might be this year's "Slumdog Millionaire."

By my lights, "Precious" is a mixed bag, in style, substance and achievement. Starting out as a no-exit horror show with a pornographically vile monster mom (Mo'Nique) festering at its heart, the movie doesn't so much evolve as flip-flop into sunlight, turning into an after-school special about the redemptive power of education and fairy godmothers.

What keeps this fault line from totally fracturing "Precious" is Gabourey Sidibe's solid-gold performance as a 350-pound black girl brutally raped by her father and used as a slave by the woman who bore her. Clareece "Precious" Jones enters the film as a non-person, an ambulatory heap of flesh, lacking even the appeal of a dumb animal. There's documentary truth in the way Sidibe slowly allows us to see through her sullen survivalist's body-armor to the lively human child entombed within. This remarkable, first-time actress makes Clareece truly precious, a full-fledged member of the human tribe.

The harrowing story's adapted from a 1996 best-selling novel by a onetime Harlem teacher and poet who presumably knows whereof she writes. Sophomore director Lee Daniels ("Shadowboxer," 2006) has a history of tackling radioactive subject matter: He produced "Monster's Ball," an interracial love affair between a widow and the jailer who executed her husband, and "The Woodsman," an unforgiving chronicle of a child molester fighting for redemption.

Daniels, known for imaginative casting (he tapped Halle Berry to play the dramatic role in "Monster's Ball" that won her a surprise Oscar), corralled glamour-puss comedian Mo'Nique, to play the hell out of a physically repugnant sociopath, and "Glitter" girl Mariah Carey, excellent as well, although almost unrecognizable as a plain, steel-spined social worker.

Excepting Lenny Kravitz, an attractive but minor presence in "Precious," Daniels aims for a world according to Pedro Almodóvar (his directorial inspiration), populated by many colorful mothers, some angelic, others demonic. A director who vamps as artiste, flamboyant poseur and hustler, Daniels charmed the Cannes festival audience by lilting, "I'm a little homo, I'm a little Euro, and I'm a little ghetto!"

Entering "Precious" is tantamount to plunging into hell. Our dramatic "ride" lumbers through space like an obese zombie, the features of her face, locus of potential expression, hooded by fat. It's cruel mockery that this creature should look into a mirror and fantasize a beautiful, blond white girl. Schoolroom, street and her mother's dimly lit, slovenly apartment are venues for torture and contempt: denied humanity, Clareece is no-thing, abuse her sole purpose for being.

Pregnant with her second child -- the first has Down's -- by her father, Clareece finds herself expelled from school. (Despite good grades, she can neither write nor read.) At home, her greasy, unkempt "guardian" sprawls in front of the TV, sucking up "The $100,000 Pyramid" and piles of pigs' feet she demands Clareece cook and share. Whatever virulent self-loathing simmers in this monster, she visits 10 times over on her child.

Mo'Nique never retreats one inch from the full malevolence of this twisted sister. Flaying Clareece with her barbed tongue, flaunting her Down's grandchild as welfare prop, tossing a newborn to the floor in a gesture of cold-hearted jealousy, she's all vampire, a parasite whose penultimate self-revelation fails as a bid for sympathy, so chillingly unclean is her confession. If there's justice, Oscar will take note of this performance.

Traumatized audiences probably won't be bothered by the film's rapid rise out this unbearable underworld. Most will just be grateful to get some light and air. When Clareece signs up at an alternative school for ambitious misfits, she falls in with a saintly instructor (Paula Patton) and a bunch of potty-mouthed, good-hearted kids only a few degrees removed from "Welcome Back, Kotter." In this sudden haven Clareece begins to let her soul out to play.

It's too good to be true, an alternative universe a liberal do-gooder might dream up (think of Paul Haggis' "Crash"). There's something jarring, even dishonest, in the night-and-day contrast Daniels draws between Clareece's disgusting dam and Blu Rain, the slim, light-skinned, fine-featured teacher who arrives at the hole-in-the-wall school wearing stylish ensembles, richly textured and soft-colored. Did we mention that she's a lesbian, untainted by brutish male lust? Ultimately, this matriarchal nest (there's only one, slightly femme boy in the remedial class) feels like cockle-warming fantasy.

William Faulkner once opined, "Man performs and engenders so much more than he can or should have to bear. That's how he finds that he can bear anything." That's the potent truth the remarkable actress Gabourey Sidibe finds in the character of Clareece "Precious" Jones, summed up in her fat girl's mantra: "The other day, I cried. I felt stupid. But you know what? F--- that day."

Also: Winfrey, Perry 'Precious' Together