With awards season upon us there are so many movies I vowed to see and they didn’t include “Precious.”

I had all the usual excuses for not going to a film about an illiterate, pregnant abused teenage girl. I knew from reading reviews that it was raw and relentless. And isn’t the news hard enough to endure without adding in extra cinematic suffering?
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We all have our limits on what we pay money to see. I avoid movies that involve torture, rape and sexual violence. I hate watching bodies being blown up and I don’t like war movies. I can’t stand to see people abusing children and sadistic killers.

Same with books. If a book starts out with the body of a murdered woman or a kidnapped child I usually stop right there. I even have a hard time with those nature movies where the grizzly bear stalks the baby buffalo and eats it, even though I know this is the natural way.

I would pass on “Precious,” I said. I didn’t want to spend time with that poor hopeless kid.

Then I sucked it up and went, mostly because I had two movie companions who know about the cruelty heaped on children – a friend who survived her own violent childhood and another woman I know professionally who directs a parenting program that works with abused kids.

If they could handle real life, I could handle a movie.

No one wants to watch abuse and suffering. In one of the more shocking scenes in “Precious” I threw my coat over my head. But maybe we need to see these things because if they don’t happen to us, they happen to others. It’s the same reason to see one more movie about the Holocaust, to not simply sit there and groan “how can people do this to each other,” but to bear witness so maybe those horrors won’t happen again.

Maybe after you watch a movie about a teenager who has every reason to scrawl “Why me?” on a piece of paper, you end up donating money to a safe house. Or you become a Big Brother or Big Sister, or work to keep social service programs alive. But you don’t leave untouched.

Let me back up to what I said about Precious being this poor hopeless kid. She isn’t hopeless.

I saw the movie when the Haiti earthquake disaster was in its second week. I heard a pediatrician cry on the radio about the children she watched die because medical help came too late. But I saw a man find his wife under a building, alive after days without water, food or daylight. And there were triumphant rescue workers on the TV, crawling out of the rubble with a 15-day old baby.

There’s hope in Haiti and there is more than a spark of life in Precious, even in that fierce face, scrunched up against a world which seems to deliver only misery.

Tough important movies are best watched in a matinee which gives you time to shut down the awful images before you sleep. We went to the movie on a wet afternoon when rain pounded the roof and thunder rattled the theater. When it was over we went for tea. We all needed to talk.

We talked about unloved children and the importance of intervention when families can’t do it themselves. We talked about the unlikely places people find friends. And praised the kind determination of overworked teachers. We talked about the need to keep art museums open and children writing.

No surprise, the woman who runs the parenting program said stories about children like Precious are not unique to Harlem. They happen right here in beautiful Wine Country.

Susan Swartz is an author and journalist in Sebastopol. You can also read her at www.juicytomatoes.com and hear her Another Voice commentary on KRCB-FM radio on Fridays. Email is susan@juicytomatoes.com

Photo courtesy of ingridspeak.wordpress.com