I didn’t see The Blind Side when it came out. There were many reasons for that. For starters, I’m not much of a Sandra Bullock fan. What movies I had seen her in either didn’t work for me at all, or her character did not for one reason or another. For another, I am not a sports fan. I do more or less know how American football works. But I would not call myself a fan. And finally, the trailers didn’t work for me at all. It looked too much like it was setting up a white savior narrative while the simple kid the rich family takes in teaches them about being a family or something screwy like that. Really, it just wasn’t my thing.
But hey, I still opt to decide for myself as often as possible, and it was leaving HBO Max at the end of the month until…it came back later, probably.
Michael Oher (Quinton Aaron) is a large, quiet, homeless young African American brought into a largely white private school by the football coach looking for a new player. Oher is quiet, and most of his teachers don’t think he has much ability to actually get his homework done, let alone pass his classes. But one day while walking to the gym to get a place to sleep, he’s spotted by the wealthy Tuohy family driving home. The Tuohys are all athletes in one sport or another, and hard-charging multi-tasker mother Leigh Anne (Bullock) decides to take the kid everyone calls “Big Mike” (a nickname it turns out Oher hates) home, eventually becoming the boy’s guardian, and helping him to achieve his best on the gridiron until Oher finally gets into college and later the NFL. The whole thing is based on a true story, much of which was taken from one of the ongoing narratives in Michael Lewis’s nonfiction book of the same name about the rise of one particular position on the football field, a position that Oher is uniquely talented to play well.
Now, it is worth noting that this movie has earned a fair amount of controversy, mostly in how the hulking Oher needs to be told how to play football in the most simplistic terms possible by dainty Leigh Anne Tuohy and to a lesser extent her young son S.J. (Jae Head). I haven’t done a lot of research on this outside of Wikipedia, so I am hardly an expert on what the real Oher has to say, but he isn’t fond of that aspect of the movie because it suggests he had to be told how to play a game he’d studied his whole life by his adoptive family, to say nothing of how the movie portrayed his intelligence. Wikipedia also notes Oher appreciates other aspects of the movie on the subject of perseverance and the importance of his family, but the movie does have a questionable depiction of Oher and how he learned to play the game he’s so good at at the very least.
But what about the rest of the movie? Honestly, it didn’t do much for me, and the only explanation I can get for why Bullock won an Oscar for this role was there wasn’t much competition that year. She’s fine, I don’t dislike her as an actress or anything, but there didn’t seem to be much special about this role compared to other Oscar-winning performances I’ve seen from other actors and actresses I’ve seen. It was a largely good performance, if nothing special, in a role that seemed to me to be written at best as cliched. Of course the Tuohys are good people who help Oher, and what passes for conflict between them is settled rather easily.
That could more or less describe my take on the movie as a whole. It didn’t seem all that groundbreaking. It is, at best, a basic story that I have probably seen many times before and that, when asked, I will remember as watching but not much else…kinda like Driving Miss Daisy, only that one had the added challenge of being a period piece. I still wouldn’t call myself a Sandra Bullock fan, but I will at least hope she gets something I like better than this movie.
Grade: C
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