The Blind Side
Sandra Bullock, the 45-year-old half-German, half-American movie star, born on the fringe of the south and sporting a curiously clipped nose that's more equine than bovine, has had quite a time these past 12 months. She's played confident, rather overbearing women in three highly popular movies. In The Proposal she played a workaholic publisher saving herself from deportation to Canada by compelling an ambitious subordinate to marry her. All About Steve, a farcical road movie in which she was a crazy crossword-puzzle designer pursuing a TV reporter from coast to coast, brought her a Golden Raspberry or Razzie, one of the comic awards set up to honour the year's worst films and performances, which she was game enough to accept in person.
The third film, The Blind Side, a feelgood movie about race, football and mom, brought her an Academy award. The prize was rapidly followed by her separation from what sounds like a low-life husband, giving rise to a new tabloid curse. Winning an Oscar, it's said, inevitably precedes a divorce. So Bullock is something of a phenomenon.
I rather liked Bullock's early pictures but I've lately found her almost insufferable, and most especially so in The Blind Side. It's a true story of a familiar inspirational kind based on a book of the same title that links a crucial development in the strategy of American football to the career of a much publicised player who recently graduated from a leading southern college and signed up with a club in the National Football League. In a pre-credit sequence the writer-director John Lee Hancock, most of whose films have been set in Texas and the south, uses the role of a left tackle as an obscure metaphor for society and social strategies.
The left tackle in question is the 309lb, 6ft 4in Michael Oher (Quinton Aaron) from the black ghetto of Memphis, Tennessee, a taciturn, slow-moving lad, son of a crack-addicted mother and an absent father who committed suicide. Big Mike's a gentle giant living on the streets, who's been given a probationary place at a school for rich white kids because of his evident skills with ball games. Some time around 10 years ago at the age of 18 (the film is unclear about dates, though it's evidently in the Bush era), he's seen wandering the cold night streets of Memphis by a couple driving home in one of their BMWs from a church Thanksgiving service. They're the rich, handsome Tuohys, Leigh Anne (Bullock) and Sean (Tim McGraw), whose teenage son and daughter attend the same school. Leigh Anne, a self-styled multi-tasker, is an interior decorator, Sean owns a chain of restaurants, and they live in a grand mansion to which they take Michael for Thanksgiving. The Touhys's young son is dressed up as a Native American, there's a Norman Rockwell picture of a Thanksgiving dinner in a book on the Tuohys' coffee table, and here we have the family tendering the same hospitality to Mike that the Native Americans (later to be dispossessed) did to the Pilgrim Fathers in the 17th century. It's a very loaded image in view of the fact that Michael's ancestors came as slaves and until pretty recently didn't get near a white man's table in the deep south except as servants.
Trevor Johnston of Time Out concurs. "Unfortunately, the bizarre true-life aspect gets swamped by Carrey's ramped-up zeal, delivering a series of showpiece flourishes which dazzle at first but then prove wearing," he complains. "Maybe we don't quite buy Jim and Ewan's hots for one another, maybe the writing makes Carrey's character too much of a psychotic narcissist while rendering McGregor in terms of fluffy-bunny passivity, but either way it just ain't happening."
This is only the beginning of the Tuohys' largesse. They buy Mike clothes, give him his first bedroom, buy him an expensive car, include him in their Christmas card photograph, adopt him, and finally hire a full-time teacher to give him the academic grades that will ensure a football scholarship to one of the top universities eager to recruit him. Almost the only hiccup along the way is when a black female investigator from the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) questions whether the family has taken up Mike's cause in order to help their alma mater, the University of Mississippi, where Sean was once a basketball star and Leigh Anne a cheerleader. Along the way, Leigh Anne never makes a false or tentative move. She wins over Mike's mother, faces down a black bureaucrat in a federal office, shames up the members of her covertly mildly racist luncheon group, puts the fear of God into Mike's menacing ex-friends from the hood (by claiming to attend the same church as the DA, pack a rod and belong to the NRA), lectures the football coach and takes over his job, gives a lesson to the teachers, instructs Mike in necessary violence when in protection of the family, and raises her kids to be kind and colour-blind. There are, however, certain giveaway lines about the new south and its politics. They reveal an eagerness to forget the past and suggest that there's a touch of Sarah Palin, the new tea parties and a buried anti-Obama backlash here. Speaking of the special tutor helping Mike, Sean says: "Who'd have thought I'd have a black son before I'd met a Democrat?" When Mike goes to college, Leigh Anne warns him: "If you ever make a girl pregnant I'll drive straight down there and cut your penis off." To which her son adds: "And she will." You might call this a superlative film in the sense that "feelgood" and "feel better" are here followed by "feel best". If, when someone says to Bullock, "You've changed your mind", you can't shout her reply – "No, he's changed my mind" – you don't watch enough Hollywood films.
GUARDIAN