The Blind Side

‘Blind Side’ sticks to the playbook on race and renewal

November 20, 2009|Wesley Morris, Globe Staff

It may be based on a true story, but “The Blind Side’’ delivers two heart-yanking hours of Hollywood physics. One kid’s bad existence gets better with the application of a great deal of upper-middle-class pressure. The movie recounts the story of how a tough-loving interior decorator named Leigh Anne Touhy (Sandra Bullock ) invited Michael Oher (Quinton Aaron), an enormous, athletic African-American teenager into her Memphis McMansion to live with her two children and adoring husband (Tim McGraw).

Leigh Anne is the unstoppable force. Michael is the immovable object. But as his grades improve and as he’s nudged toward a Division 1 football scholarship (he’s a natural tackle), Michael starts to open up. But we’re meant to believe that it’s Leigh Anne who does all the growing. Which seems about right for a movie built around Bullock. She is as entertaining as she gets here.

In miniskirts and clingy pants, and with a heavy cosmetic lacquer, Bullock sashays away from the camera, leaving the males in a tizzy. The last word is always hers. She’s part Erin Brockovich, part Julia Sugarbaker. And like Sugarbaker, Leigh Anne is a designing woman. Her interest in Michael feels momentarily like an extension of her job. “Lord knows that place could use some color,’’ she says of the private Christian academy that has charitably accepted Michael, who, until Leigh Anne, was homeless and could barely express himself. The state wrested him away from his birth mother, who’s a drug addict.

Bullock’s levelheaded acting frequently saves the movie from emotional garishness. She’s hardly subtle, but she’s not showy, either. This is basically one of her comedic parts given a “Real Housewives’’ gloss. But watching Bullock light up with satisfaction brought back unwelcome memories of that nauseating hug she gives her Mexican maid at the end of “Crash’’: I love you, person of color. Leigh Anne gives Michael his very first bed and a real shot at a college football scholarship. He reminds her that her dining room table happens to be useful for dining with the family someplace other than in front of the two TVs in the living room.

Writer and director John Lee Hancock bears down on the more affecting parts of Michael Lewis’s 2006 book, “The Blind Side: Evolution of a Game.’’ (Half of it was devoted to Oher, the other to Lawrence Taylor’s arrival in the NFL.) The Touhys’ compassion and the idea of a white community banding together to help a disenfranchised black teenager is a touching human display (Kathy Bates even shows up as a tutor).