Three Strikes and a Touch Down

Rating: 8/10 (10 December 2009)

This movie had many strikes against it going in. I am not crazy about football movies, or feel-good holiday movies where everyone is without a mean bone in his or her body (except some clichéd curmudgeon who has a Scroogian change of heart in the end whether he/she be a major or minor character). Nor for the emotional manipulations and simplifications that go on when a movie is based on a true story and the filmmakers melodramatize it and dumb it down for the audience. In "The Blind Side", if these people were half as good in real life as they are made out to be in this picture, there probably never was any conflict that amounted to anything as melodramatic as the climax here. All that being said, I must give this movie a positive review.
"The Blind Side" also had a strike against it because it reminds me of the cynical joke in "The Hollywood Shuffle" about a TV sitcom where a white person takes in a bat played by a black actor and the name of the sitcom is "There's a Bat in My House", which is clearly meant to parody every clichéd sitcom about a black person living with a white host.
"The Blind Side" overcomes an awful lot of the strikes against it by being well written, directed and acted. They don't seem as much like clichés while you're watching them. Yet the clichés are all there. That is an amazing achievement. I wouldn't go to a sequel or a remake or other attempt to recapture the magic of this movie because nobody could do it without turning it into utter schmaltz.
Sandra Bullock is at the top of her game as Leigh Anne Tuohy, the real-life Memphis woman who decided to take Michael Oher, a good-natured sixteen-year-old underachiever (played sensitively by Quinton Aaron) into her home one Thanksgiving Eve and never let him leave until she and her husband sent him off to college two years later, in the mean time having become his legal guardians, hired a tutor so that he could improve his grades and seen him become sought after by dozens of college football coaches.
The only major conflicts in the plot (there are minor conflicts, of course, but we are never really afraid of them) stem from the appearance of impropriety in that the Tuohys and Michael's tutor are all alumni of the University of Mississippi and they all are seen encouraging Michael to accept a football scholarship to "Ole Miss". As the investigator from the NCAA suggests, it looks as if the Tuohys did everything that they did for Michael just so that they could boost the football fortunes of their alma mater. In the movie, Michael, who has never considered this possibility until the investigator spells it out, suddenly considers it seriously, and runs away from Leigh Anne and goes back to the projects where he spent part of his childhood. There he nearly gets killed. I smell an injection of melodrama into a more placid real life story where the dramatic conflicts were more mundane if not absent. If the Tuohys are half as good in real life as they are made out to be in this movie, I suspect that Michael would never have believed for a second that they were that nice to him just so that they could exploit him. Human beings are capable of great deviousness, but nobody can sustain an uncrackable facade of faux affection toward someone they do not really love for two whole years, especially if that someone is a teenager.
As is often the case in these sorts of movies when they are done well, the pathos is judiciously mixed with gentle humor. I laughed, I cried, goes the cliché and here it was true. I actually enjoyed being manipulated by this movie, and that says a lot considering that it had so many strikes against it going in.
Disclaimor: One thing "The Blind Side" had in its favor from the get-go is that it stars Sandra Bullock whom I absolutely adore.