From: www.cnn.com

Part of the great power of movies is that they can take us perilously close to the life of someone we might otherwise feel perilously far from.

The title character of "Precious: Based on the novel Push by Sapphire" is a hushed, damaged, morbidly obese 16-year-old African-American girl from the lower depths of Harlem. It's 1987, and Claireece Precious Jones is poor and ignorant, a depressed, withdrawn shell of a human being, with a face so inexpressive it might be a visor clamped down over her features.

Gabourey Sidibe, the startling newcomer who plays Precious, is actually softly pretty, with catlike eyes that narrow into a tensely focused glare. Precious speaks to us in voice-over (we hear her flowery notions of running off with a math teacher to suburban Westchester), and the film keeps cutting to her fantasies, which are spangly, TV-addict daydreams in which she whirls around in silk and feather boas, adored by the world.

Outside those fantasies, Precious can't imagine a life. She rarely talks, never smiles, and hardly even frowns; she looks like it would take too much effort. Sidibe plays her with barely visible tremors of feeling that cue us to what this arrested girl is holding back. She's an almost totally passive protagonist, cut off from everyone, including us.

Yet there's nothing passive about the way the director, Lee Daniels, working from a script by Geoffrey Fletcher, plunges us into the nightmare that is Precious' daily, hidden existence.