Features > Movie Reviews > The Blind Side…

A sentimental but potent feel-good film about the bond forged between a wealthy white Republican Southerner and a poor, inarticulate black kid with a plus-size physique.

Hollywood used to be America’s best advertisement. Back in the 1940s, filmmakers like Frank Capra and John Ford made movies that were sometimes critical of the social structures that prevailed at the time, but that also espoused the hopes of a generation that believed in a better future for all, in which life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness really could extend throughout the land.  And for a long time the world believed in that Dream.

These days movies are still one of America’s biggest exports, but a film like Transformers is more like a threat than a crusade, the cinematic equivalent of a military show of strength, while liberal Hollywood is engulfed in self-doubt: see The Hurt Locker. (Avatar is interesting for mixing up both modes.) 

The Blind Side is a throwback to the idealistic movies of days gone by. It’s a progressive conservative film, as if those terms weren’t mutually exclusive.

Michael Oher (Quinton Aaron) is a gentle giant from the wrong side of the tracks: Hurt Village, Memphis, Tennessee. Accepted into a private Christian school at the urging of the football coach, who sizes up his talent in one glance, Michael can’t help but stand out. He’s virtually the only black kid in school. He’s also bottom of the class across the board.

Things turn around for him when the Tuohys realise he’s living on the street. One of those women who get things done by sheer force of personality, Leigh Anne (Bullock) invites him back to their home for Thanksgiving dinner, then insists that he stay the night. Soon he has his own room and the Tuohys are talking about adoption.

Writer-director John Lee Hancock (whose last film was the underrated, The Alamo) is in no hurry to get to the sports action, he appreciates the drama here is in the unconventional mother-son bond that develops between the taciturn teenager, who shields himself from the pain in his life by shutting off from others, and the loquacious benefactress who admits she’s never even ventured into the black part of town before, but will stare down a drug dealer to protect her new charge.

Hancock ever so gently probes the family’s motives – are they more interested in furnishing a star football player for the local college team than in listening to Michael’s wishes? – but in the end everyone gets a free pass: they’re just good people.

Comparisons with Precious are inevitable – both movies are about big black kids reclaimed from poverty and ignorance through the intervention of middle-class philanthropists, but the big difference comes in the way The Blind Side virtually sidelines the kid, even though Oher has gone on to become an NFL star. This the glossy, Hollywood mainstream version of the story, emphasizing the generosity of the paternalistic white folks who take him in and his natural talent for sport, while Precious is a raw, bruising independent film, which lays more stress on the girl’s brutal upbringing and the social safety net that helps Precious to help herself.

More from Michael’s perspective might have generated welcome dramatic tension - beyond the struggle to get his grades up and to show some aggression on the football field – but then this is Sandra Bullock?s movie all the way. A manicured blonde with a tart tongue and the kind of determination you wouldn’t want to resist, Leigh Anne’s a bone fide steel magnolia, and easily the best role the star has found in the last decade. Whatever its shortcomings, I have to admit it sucked me right in.