Kenneth Padron
Ms. Parris
Literature and Film
17 April 2015 Each year more and more films are created based off books. Films can do a lot of things.
They can bring whole worlds to life before our very own eyes, make characters into living, breathing flesh and blood. They can have us on the edge of our seats as vicious battle scenes are fought right before us, have us sobbing over a death, a heartbreak or smiling with joy. Films can make us see a lot of things, sometimes things that even books cannot do so well. Yet most of the time, the book original is always better compared to it’s film adaptation. Books can create depth.
A book can delve deeply into the story itself. They can explain emotions, displayed out word for word, so that the reader not only experiences the emotion but understands what they are feeling.
While a movie only portrays events visually and audibly, a book gives reasons, motives and emotions deep inside a character, beyond what can be seen or heard. Without a doubt movies are more aesthetically pleasing to watch, but books are overall better at delivering the message what the author is trying to send. The novel “Push” and the film “Precious” follows the life of Claireece “Precious” Jones.
An illiterate 16­year­old African­American girl who has been abused and tormented her whole life by both her father and mother. She is pregnant for the second time with her father's child.
She has been kicked out of school because of her pregnancy and the school has decided to send her to an alternative school called “Each one Teach one” As she takes the placement test,
Precious ends up in Mrs. Rain’s pre­GED class. Miz Rain, as Precious calls her, teaches a class for teenagers who can’t read or write, and her unique instruction methods. She has all the students write in a journal daily, whether or not they can write at all, and responds personally to every one of their entries to inspire the students and bring them together into a tight bond.

Throughout her learning experience Precious finds purpose in life, that she isn’t the only one who feels alone in this world, as she meets Rita, Rhonda, and Jermaine who come from a troubled background. Mrs. Rain the teacher makes each student have a journal and write what they feel at a specific moment. During the second birth of her son, she discovers the she is HIV positive. Lee Daniels’s film adaptation of the novel “Push” by Sapphire follows the novel quite closely in it’s portrayal of Precious. Both the film and novel delivers the same message but approaches it quite differently. The film lacks in showing Precious’s thoughts, and monologue. A large amount of detail of her thoughts in the novel are nonexistent in the movie. This lefts out the amount of pain and torment that Precious actually goes through. In the book, the story is written in Precious’s voice, the text spelled phonetically just the way as she is speaking it. Without that intense inner voice, that uniqueness, the story ends up losing a lot of its impact and mostly just ended up feeling like your quintessential inspiring school teacher and troubled teen story. In this scene within the novel Precious says to herself, "Mrs. Lichenstein, looked at me like I got three arms or a bad odor out my pussy or something. What my muver gon' do I want to say. What is she gonna do?
But I don't say that. I jus' say, “My muver is busy.” This is a great example of how important that internal monologue of Precious' character is. In the film all we see and hear is Precious sitting there, silent, and then mumble "My muver is busy." This leaves out everything about Precious' discomfort with the mention of her mother, and leaves out a lot of information. The movie failed to show how Precious progressed as a student in the alternative school she was attending. In the book, the reader could notice how Precious gradually improved her spelling and grammar through writing in her