Movie review: Emotional End Zone with 'Blind Side'
Uplifting. Heartwarming. Schmaltzy but effective. Watching "The Blind Side," I felt my emotions being stage-managed, but once or twice I got something in my eye. It's inspired by a feel-good true story of interracial adoption and gridiron glory. The project could have been designed by scientists synthesizing the crowd-pleasing-movie genome. Bullock + football + Kumbaya = Ka-ching!
Sandra Bullock plays Leigh Anne Tuohy, a steel magnolia whose conservative certitude and indomitable willpower make Sarah Palin look lily-livered. Her husband, Sean (Tim McGraw), owns scores of fast-food franchises, her daughter and son go to Memphis' swankiest Christian prep school, and she has a decorating business and country club luncheons to fill her idle hours.
Perhaps she needs a new challenge. For whatever reason, when she sees a black teen walking along a dark roadway, she orders him into her car and takes him home for a sleepover. When she learns that the boy, Michael Oher, has nowhere to live, she gives him a home in her McMansion. The Tuohys are the sort of family that would fight a tax hike for idealistic social programs, but see their Christian duty to do right by Michael. Films don't often show us compassionate conservatives, and I was happy to meet them.
Michael doesn't see his situation in racial terms. ("He thinks he's a redneck," Sean marvels.) Neither do the Tuohys, but they learn a few unpleasant truths about their friends' attitudes. Michael's quiet appreciation of their advantages teaches his privileged new family gratitude. When one of her lunch cronies praises Leigh Anne for changing the boy's life, she insists, "He's changing mine."
Bullock makes her iron-willed matriarch strong, sexy and likable, while newcomer Quinton Aaron plays Michael as a gentle giant with a broken spirit, so inhibited he's almost mute. Once Michael's grades improve, he promises to be an unstoppable football star. All he lacks is the killer instinct. Leigh Anne is the woman to teach him that.
One aspect of the film feels unsatisfactory. The Tuohys never patronize, but they seem clueless about several acts of racial insensitivity. Leigh Anne comments that Michael reminds her of Ferdinand the Bull, which carries an unfortunate subtext here. I hope the idea is that the good-hearted Tuohys are novices around black people.
Nearsighted though it occasionally may be, "The Blind Side" makes a strong case for the emotional rewards and social justice of helping others less fortunate. Even if it manipulates us like a sock puppet.
