Review: The Blind Side

Sandra Bullock, Quinton Aaron, Tim McGraw, Kathy Bates, Kim Dickens. Written and Directed by John Lee Hancock, but the book by Michael Lewis. Warner Brothers. Rated PG-13 (for one scene involving brief violence, drug and sexual references). 125 minutes.

Sandra Bullock gives the performance of her career in The Blind Side, based on the 2006 book by Michael Lewis, the true story of a well-tended Memphis matron who opened her home and heart to an underprivileged African-American teen and made big changes in his life, and her own.

The kid became real life professional football player Michael Oher, who began as a disenfranchised child of the projects—and whom, for reasons the film doesn’t quite explain, Sean (Tim McGraw) and Leigh Anne Tuohy (Bullock) decided to take under their wings.

The Tuohys were a happily married and affluent Tennessee couple with two children and several fast-food franchises, who became an adopted family to Oher, eventually shepherding him through school and on to a college football scholarship.

The film opens with teenaged “Big Mike” (Quinton Aaron), the product of a tumultuous early childhood, living with a drug-addicted mother and having little aptitude for academics until joining an all-white Christian school and befriending the Tuohy’s young son S.J. (Jae Head).

With a low I.Q. and no incentive to learn, Ohner is going nowhere until the Tuohy’s take him in out of the rain and invite him to spend Thanksgiving. “You don’t think he’ll steal anything, do you?” she asks her husband. When he doesn’t, she’s shopping for new clothes in the big and tall shops and accompanying Michael back to the projects in Memphis neighborhoods she’s never seen. To the film’s credit, it’s clear that Leigh Anne is driven by the desire to do something simply good—not by a crusading cause.

She lunches with brittle ladies who see her humanitarian side as questionable and prefer charities to the humans behind them, and in a requisite scene, she tells them off for trivializing her motivations. She’s learning about life from Michael, but in small ways, like when he reminds her that the dinner table is for family gatherings, not the television.

While The Blind Side’s heart is in the right place, at times it feels too well-intentioned, mounting a vision of utopia as a white community pitches in for the greater good of a poor, black kid (including a terrific Kathy Bates as a private tutor) that at times the film feels somewhat too precious. Bullock herself came to a similar realization near the end of her strong work in Crash, as a pampered princess who redeemed herself by realizing the maid was actually—surprise—a real person too.

The Blind Side also suffers in comparison to gritty Precious, the harrowing story of the abuse and spiritual redemption of a young African American woman, also currently in release. But where Precious is a downbeat drama, The Blind Side is an uplifting and winning picture.

Not that The Blind Side doesn’t raise a few serious issues of its own related to a young African American man in the house and misguided community suspicions about its potential affect on the teen daughter, the potential bias and self-serving interests of the Tuohy’s striving to get Oher into their Ole Miss alma matter (investigated by the ACLU) and the ability of one to truly escape their past—in this case, a ghetto rife with both the threat of violence and Michael’s undying compassion for his own mother.

One of the nicest surprises about The Blind Side is that even though the film feels like formula, it still frequently subverts our expectations. Sean and Leigh Anne have a happy marriage. Mike doesn’t have the usual anger or delinquency problems. Peer status doesn’t matter to the teenaged daughter. There is no big game in the climax.

Leigh Anne is one tough character, and though I knew little about the true story, she commands every situation she’s in—from wrangling with the football coach to confronting gang bangers in the slums. Bullock is also very effective in a scene with Oher’s birth mother, negotiating a potential adoption, and the actress cuts through class and social barriers in these moments with a sensitivity free from the obvious ways we expect the scenes to develop. In such moments, we expect Leigh Anne to act like a fish out of water, a sassy southerner or even a frightened white woman, and when she doesn’t, the actress wins us over.

Nearly the entire cast is solid, including musician McGraw as a nice guy husband who doesn’t exactly wear the family pants. Sharon Morris is also forceful ACLU representative and Kim Dickens is affecting as a teacher who sees Oher’s potential, and persists. The one exception is young Head as grade-school son S.J. His work here is precocious and distracting; a child actor who needs modulation.

But the film belongs to 45-year old Bullock, a knockout in this film, with perfect skin, golden tan and a blonde mane, lovelier than she has ever been onscreen, and smarter too. She quickly makes us forget we’re watching one of movie’s sweetest comedians (who used her charm to great effect, and not so great effect, earlier this year in both The Proposal and All About Steve). In The Blind Side, she never leans on her comic abilities, finding a dramatic center of gravity that culminates in a truly moving final scene between mother and adopted son, unsentimental and earned.

- Lee Shoquist