Who knows if that guy even wanted to play football?!

Rating: 4/10 (8 December 2009)

There's a word that I learned listening to smart people talk about issues and subtext and social justice and post-modernism: "problematic". When a person has a problem with something like a video game or capitalism or the way coffee gets to my house, when they think it's bad or wrong or unfair but don't actually have a solution or better, correct, more fair idea in mind, things are "problematic". They have the aura of a problem. There's a whiff of trouble, a little stinky hint.
John Lee Hancock's The Blind Side is problematic. The film stars Sandra Bullock and Tim McGraw as the Tuohys, and Quinton Aaron as Michael Oher, their leviathan adopted son. The film is based on the book of the same name, which details in part the story of how Oher, abandoned by a crack-addict mother and homeless as a high-school sophomore, came to live with and be adopted by the blindingly white, incredibly rich Republican Tuohy family, who helped him eventually make it to the NFL as an offensive linesman.
In the film as in reality, the NCAA had legitimate concerns about the Tuohy's actions re: Oher, suggesting that perhaps they, as massive boosters for Ole Miss football had taken him in and hired him a professional tutor in the hopes that they could convince him, prodigiously gifted as he was athletically, to play for their alma mater, which he eventually did. The film handles this question as if it were a legitimate puzzle, as if the actions of the Tuohys are beyond their own ken – Bullock's Leigh Ann asks her husband at one point, "Am I a good person?" Oher in the film is just as puzzled. He has no idea of their motivations, because he is an inarticulate mass, a giant silent looming prop, the obelisk against which the Tuohys can attempt to effect their idea of Christian charity. He's not quite Michael Clark Duncan's obsequious blubbering Magic Black Man from The Green Mile, but he's close enough. To the white, southern Tuohys, to his white coaches and teammates, he's an unfathomable, totemic, black force that might have been dredged up from the bottom of the ocean. What everyone does see, instantaneously, is that he is large, strong and fast, so they without even bothering to ask turn him into a football player. Leigh Ann is asked at one point in the film if what she's doing is out of white guilt, and it's clearly not. The film, though, is going to make a lot of guilty-feeling white people very happy. That's problematic.
What rescues the film from complete collapse is the performance of Sandra Bullock. It's a rare gift for an actor to be able to do work that seems to be a conscious decision on the part of the performer to work to make the film better. Bullock's performance is not just razor-sharp and subtle, it seems calculated, it seems like she as an actress recognized the inherent problems in her character and in the way the film is put together and worked in her performance to correct those problems. Her performance is superb. In every scene in which the film could or would dip into maudlin sentimentality and pathetic white-people-saving-black-people (as long as they're athletic and will help the team full of white people win) sludge, she's a little frosted-haired scalpel, cutting through the dross. Unfortunately the film has scenes without her in it, and those are often terrible.
Ultimately, the film does to Oher what the Tuohys did to him. He never speaks about his relationship with the family outside of a few pithy one-liners and smiles. He's never allowed to be articulate about his background, or goals, or disappointments. He's a prop moved around at will by people motivated by a weird combination of religious and athletic morality, a giant instinctual force, aimed by anyone but himself and unleashed. It's not quite offensive, I don't think, but it certainly is problematic. 4/10