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I dreaded this movie.  I know a film review isn’t really about the reviewer, and I am not making this the exception.  I just think it is important to say at the outset that the thought of spending a couple of hours with Sandra Bullock in a feel-good sports movie based on a true story made me want to begin slicing my wrists with the Junior Mints box I was holding. The thing is, after I relaxed my preconceptions, The Blind Side charmed me. A little. 
 
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Certainly, director John Lee Hancock, whose last delivery was the stilted The Alamo, seems to have every element a studio marketing team would love to meet. For the gals, there is Sandra Bullock’s quirkiness combined with just a smidge of brassy feminism and some dreamy family-values style a la Tim McGraw.  To her credit, Bullock shelves her apparent passion for slapstick and plays her role with a great deal of honesty, although it probably wouldn’t have hurt to turn down the Branson-style folksiness.  And for the guys, you have football and a bit of male vulnerability in actor Quinton Aaron. Plus it’s based on a true story, so you can watch the real-life guy (Michael Oher of the Baltimore Ravens) and pretend like you know him.  
 
The Touhy family, played by Bullock and McGraw and punctuated their two kids are so earnest and glowing it is almost distracting. So when Leigh Anne Touhy literally rescues Oher from the streets on Thanksgiving like he is a stray puppy, it feels a little like an after-school special.  Although Oher is nicely played by Aaron as a hulking, silent, misunderstood addition to the Touhy’s family, it is hard not to wonder what is stirring behind his grateful eyes.  Certainly, being swept into a white suburban Brady Bunch home for a black man who hasn’t known any stability or family for his 16 years of life would cause a bit of conflict, even if only internally.  Rather, Oher meshes perfectly into this Wonder Bread family without a hint of conflict or transition.  As perfectly upbeat as the Touhy’s are portrayed, Oher is presented equally blank and malleable. 
 
The unspoken discomfort I found in watching this is the ever-so subtle racial message, which uses the film as an opportunity to once again showcase a Glamour Shot version of white America reaching beyond its place to help a downtrodden minority--just the kind of stuff that helps stomp down the shared Caucasian guilt we all carry around.  That said, this is how the story supposedly happened, but I think there are probably larger unspoken themes at play that may provide a bit of misgiving.
 
The Blind Side will find your heart-strings and pluck the hell out of them, no doubt.  And, no matter the source, most will find a familiar lump in the throat and some welcome goosebumps at some point while watching.  But somewhere inside this wonderful story of human endurance on every level, is a real movie with real people.  And that is the movie this story deserved.
 
--Greg Wilson
 


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