“The Blind Side”

I went with my parents and nephew last night to see “The Blind Side.” You may recall that the first trailer for “The Blind Side” raised my hackles, appearing to turn the story of a young black man into a feel-good story about a white woman. On the whole, though, I was pleasantly surprised. I really, really liked it.

I was expecting the film adaptation of Michael Lewis’s book to dumb down the football; it doesn’t. (There’s even a replay of the infamous Joe Theismann leg break that starts off the book – you’ve been warned.) The film does compress Michael Oher’s high school career and ends with him going to college, but that’s because the film chooses to focus less on Oher’s development as a football player and more on his extraordinary personal journey.

In a nutshell, Oher was an essentially homeless ward of the state with no educational background when he was accepted into a tony Christian private school along with a family friend. A wealthy white family first lets him crash on their couch, then starts buying him clothes, and then gradually welcomes Oher into their family, finally becoming his legal guardians.

The film actually tones down the more Dickensian aspects of Oher’s life before meeting the Tuohy family. We see him carrying his one change of clothes in a grocery bag everywhere he goes, spending the night in laundromats and scrounging popcorn left in the stands after a volleyball game. At times it seems emotionally manipulative, but the thing is, is all true (at least as told by the book – I have no idea how accurate that was).

And the film gives Oher more agency than I was expecting from that first trailer. Too often in these “magical negro” movies, where people of color only exist to help white people reach enlightenment, the black characters aren’t allowed to have their own opinions or anxieties. But, even though Oher doesn’t talk much, we do get to hear how isolated he feels in the nearly all-white, affluent school, and we do see his protectiveness of the people he cares about and his fear of being abandoned or used.

Unfortunately, every other black character is presented as being exotic, threatening, otherworldy. The character of a drug dealer in Oher’s old neighborhood, who’s meant to represent what Oher’s trying to escape, is a total cliché straight out of an after-school special… but as a symbol, that’s kind of what he’s supposed to do. We briefly glimpse Oher’s mother and a brother, and these peripheral bits have the effect of reminding us how totally Oher is apart from his blood family.

While the film adaptation (like the book) acknowledges the problem of racial privilege, it doesn’t go much beyond that. Mrs. Tuohy (Sandra Bullock) has to call out the ladies-who-lunch friends who worry about having a young black man around her teenaged daughter, and she admits the reality that so many men from Oher’s background – athletically gifted or not – too often get caught up in gang violence, sometimes fatally.

But the same questions that the book occasionally brings up go unanswered here. While the Tuohys’ charity is remarkable, even radical, and certainly altered the course of Michael Oher’s life, what about the institutional problems that disadvantaged him to begin with? What role do racism and poverty play there? The Tuohys are conservatives – did they change their opinions about the importance of government safety-net programs in alleviating these problems? Above all, if Michael Oher were a 150-pound piano prodigy, would this story end the same way?

My hope is that people seeing “The Blind Side” will be inspired to look further into these questions, and not just take the film at its well-made face value. So, as a film, I’d give “The Blind Side” somewhere between 2.5 and three stars. As a cultural artifact, it’s not quite there.