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closeFriday, Nov. 20, 2009
'The Blind Side’ turns a blind eye toward sports story’s racial overtones
Despite some sharp moves, 'The Blind Side' turns a blind eye to its racial overtones.
By Christopher Kelly
The Blind Side begins with a gripping lesson in modern sports history, taken directly from Michael Lewis’ 2006 book The Blind Side: Evolution of a Game. As stock footage of the famous Lawrence Taylor sack that ended Joe Theismann’s quarterbacking career flickers on the screen, Sandra Bullock, in Southern-twanged narration, takes us through the five-second play, illustrating how it forever altered the way football is played. No longer could the position of left tackle — the offensive lineman charged with protecting the quarterback’s "blind side" — be taken for granted.
It would be wonderful to say that from this intelligent beginning, director John Lee Hancock has fashioned an elegant bookend to his 2002 baseball movie, The Rookie — a movie that pushes past sports movie sentimentality and shows us how the sausage gets made. No such luck. The Blind Side, which follows the story of Michael Oher (Quinton Aaron), a homeless black teenager taken in and groomed to play left tackle by a wealthy white Memphis couple (Bullock and Tim McGraw), quickly devolves into familiar sports soap opera, one with grossly racist overtones. The fact that this is a true-life tale doesn’t excuse the filmmakers from exulting in a steady parade of clichés and stereotypes.
When Leigh Anne and Sean Tuohy first invite "Big Mike" to stay with them, they only expect him to stay for the night. But Michael, a scholarship student at their children’s tony private school, has no place else to go. The brassy, type-A Leigh Anne regards him as a project. She also believes that his test scores, which show unusually high marks in a category called "protective instincts," mark him as a potentially brilliant football player.
The film, in short, is nothing more than a white Southern wish-fulfillment fantasy: The Tuohys get to rescue a disadvantaged black child and persuade him to play football for their beloved Ole Miss. Hancock (who also wrote the screenplay) has no idea how to deal with such racially complicated material, and so he opts for the easiest way out: He sanctifies Leigh Anne and her family, and regards anyone who might dare question their motives as evil. In classic Hollywood fashion — see everything from Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner to Mississippi Burning — he also takes a story that rightly belongs to an African-American and transforms it into a story of a white person’s moral awakening.
Wearing a long blond wig and cleavage-enhancing dresses, Bullock does a terrific job capturing the steely spirit of a Southern diva without devolving into caricature. But Oher is an exhaustingly passive figure, and unlike, say, Gabourey Sidibe in the similarly themed, vastly superior Precious, young Aaron gives us no insight into what’s going on inside his character’s head. Oher ultimately comes across more like the family mascot than an actual person.
By the time the Tuohys are accused of manipulating Michael so that he would choose Ole Miss during the college recruiting process (a steady stream of famous coaches, including Lou Holtz and Nick Saban, appear as themselves in these scenes), The Blind Side seems to have lost all good sense. Does Hancock even realize, for instance, that all of the white people who surround Michael (including his tutor, played by Kathy Bates) are saviors, while all of the blacks (including the NCAA investigator assigned to the case, played by Sharon Morris, and Michael’s estranged mother, played by Adriane Lenox) are determined to wreck his life?
Maybe that’s the point the director is ultimately trying to make — that the black community has turned against its own — but the movie is far too timid and unimaginative to take such a controversial stand. This is just a big, naïve fairy tale designed to coddle both whites and blacks. In the end, the Tuohys are redeemed, Michael Oher triumphs, and the audience is treated like a bunch of kindergartners.
Rated PG-13 (violence, strong language); 126 min.
In wide release
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