America has spoken and, resoundingly, it has said “WE LOVE THE BLIND SIDE.” The Sandra Bullock/sad football player vehicle has grossed over $100 million in three weeks, is on pace to possibly break $250 million, and even beat Twilight at the box office this week. So, the newspaper I occasionally write for asked me to go see it. I know, I know. But I have this weird thing where, whenever something becomes a phenomenon or even an unexpected success, I really want to check it out. With The Blind Side I was especially curious, how did it manage to beat New Moon? Was there anything at all redeeming about a film that, on first glance, looked hopelessly schlocky?
No. No there is not.
This is an appallingly stupid movie; one that is willing to employ every hacky, C-level trick in the book to manipulate you and one that is completely tone deaf to the issues it is supposedly taking on.
If you don’t know, the film is based on Michael Lewis’ excellent nonfiction book The Blind Side in the same way that gonorrhea is based on fucking. In Lewis’ book, the inspirational story of Michael Oher’s rise from abject poverty thanks to his skills as an offensive lineman is put into an almost fatalistic context as Lewis dissects the way advances in football stategy turned the left tackle into the most important position on the offense. In the film, director and writer John Lee Hancock strips away Lewis’ history lessons and shades of grey, turning the film into a generic, Lifetime ready story of how spoiled rich people saved some poor sucker’s life.
Fully 1/3 of The Blind Side’s dire 128 minute running time is composed of close-up or medium shots of actor Quinton Aaron’s sad, droopy face (in the role of Michael Oher), looking at nothing or no one in particular. Aaron is either the most minimalistic actor to ever appear on screen, or the guy just can’t perform very well as his expression literally never changes throughout the entire film. The other 2/3 consist mainly of Sandra Bullock asking Aaron questions like “what book did your mom read you before you went to bed” or “why don’t you own any clothes” and then being stunned when it turns out that Oher is too poor and too black to have had any of those experiences. Rather than coming off as empathetic or charitable, she simply seems like the dumbest, most sheltered woman who ever lived. As written, the character isn’t forceful or funny (like the script wants her to be), just hateful and irritating, and even the best actor would have trouble with it. But instead of the best actor, the producers got Sandra Bullock, who gives a performance so hideous that it shoots the concept of subtlety in the face and then fucks the body.
John Lee Hancock’s direction is a little better than the Z-grade acting and script, although he uses it in service of naked, calculating, unearned manipulation. His favorite trick, and its an extremely irritating one, involves cutting to reaction shots of people in the same room watching the film’s most inspirational moments (like when Tim McGraw recites “The Charge of the Light Brigade” and relates it to football. Yes, it is as asinine as it sounds) in awe, looking on with wonder as a character does something amazing to improve the life of poor, innocent young Michael Oher. The movie keeps going to this cheap trick again and again, like Bill Belicheck calling a screen pass on 3rd down, as if the movie itself cannot get over how mindblowingly inspiring it is. And I’m sure this will shock you, but in its eagerness to make sure you don’t think at all, the movie glosses over any of the tough issues of race and class that Oher’s story raises, and the ambiguity of what the Tuohy family did.
“The Blind Side” takes everything that makes Michael Oher’s story compelling and casts it aside in favor of a story that feels so manipulated and hollow that I forgot that it was based on a true story. It is less a story than a collection of episodes, some “funny” some “sad,” without any truth to it. People don’t act the way people in “The Blind Side” act, from the sub-Two and a Half Men schtick of the Tuohy’s young son to painful way Sandra Bullock oversells every emotional beat she has to play. At times it is so laugh-inducingly bad that it seems to be ironically parodying itself, but this film isn’t that aware of anything, least of all itself.
Michael
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