The Blind Side
Backward Sports Drama | 126 Minutes | 2009 | United States
(1/4)
Director: John Lee Hancock | Producers: Broderick Johnson, Andrew Kosove, Gil Netter | Screenplay: John Lee Hancock | Based on: The Blind Side: Evolution of a Game by Michael Lewis | Starring: Sandra Bullock, Tim McGraw, Quinton Aaron, Jae Head, Lily Collins, Ray McKinnon, Katy Bates | Music: Carter Burwell | Cinematography: Alar Kivilo | Editor: Mark Livolsi
The Blind Side purports to tell the real-life story of Michael Oher, depicted here as a poor oversized black kid from the ghetto. He’s in and out of foster homes thanks to an absentee father and a drug addict mother, until the father of one of his friends – on whose couch he has been sleeping – brings him to the attention of the football coach of a local Christian school. The coach is so taken with ‘Big Mike’, thanks to his sheer bulk and an ability to shoot hoops, that he wrangles his admission, despite Michael’s lack of school records, low IQ, and the fact nobody even knows his age.
We don’t hear from this friend’s benevolent father again, and Michael’s own father dies, apparently falling from an overpass, but no matter, they are beside the point. Michael is befriended by a curious young student named SJ: turns out that SJ’s family is decidedly upper class, and conservative, and when they notice Michael shivering outside in the cold they’ve room and heart enough to take him into their home. He goes from rags and the gang-riven, drug-addled ghetto to the riches of polo shirts, an education, and high school football. The Tuohy family, led by the formidable Leigh Anne, must buck societal convention in order to accommodate him, and there’ll be ups and downs along the way, but there’s a feeling it’ll all turn out right in the end.
The Blind Side was released towards the end of 2009: a few years hence and the film is enough to make you wonder whether you lived through the period. It seems outdated and miscalculated in every respect. The Blind Side carries every antiquated trope around black savages and their white saviours: Michael isn’t a savage himself, but his background is irredeemably so and offers only the lures of drugs and crime; the black people in his life are uniformly bad influences or incapable of sticking around long enough to make an impact; he is dumb, although not beyond teaching, but despite his lack of wit the movie has the temerity to say that he ranks high in ‘protective instincts’; and by saving Michael from a dismal fate and putting him on the right track, Leigh Anne not only shows her moral virtue but learns something valuable about herself.
So The Blind Side is wrongheaded if not necessarily ill-intentioned, nothing about the presentation or the performances can salvage its shoddy themes, and it’s probably also overlong. Most movies of this type would emphasize the prejudice of a few school bullies and Leigh Anne’s upper-crust friends, then correct the doubters and climax with a triumphant high school football game. The Blind Side manages another thirty or forty minutes as it stews over Michael’s choice of college: an investigation takes place to determine whether the Tuohy’s have been coercing Michael all along, in order to get him to play for their alma mater, the University of Mississippi. As elsewhere – for instance when he has to up his grades – Michael passes the test thanks to a pat answer which resonates emotionally more than it makes sense, this timid and voiceless character sounding less like a real person than a dunce forced to read lines from a Little Women script.
Sandra Bullock has a knack for choosing schlocky pictures, surpassed only by her knack for being utterly likeable all the while. As Leigh Anne though she’s not especially likeable: she’s gritty and from the outset we see that the world is going to bend to her will, while Quinton Aaron’s Michael is too reserved and too doltish to provide a useful foil. Tim McGraw as Sean Tuohy is amiable enough, and as The Blind Side is Hollywood by numbers, breathtakingly old-fashioned more than overtly offensive, you might watch the whole thing and wind up perfectly content. Bullock somehow won an Oscar for it, proving that this was her Erin Brockovich, that it ticked all the right boxes in showing a card-carrying NRA member with a social justice bent. The only humour in The Blind Side comes from the dorkish juxtaposition between little white SJ and his hulking adoptive brother. It seems to hew close to its source material, but the real Michael Oher – who graduated to the NFL and now boasts a Super Bowl ring – was surely something more than this.
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