March 5, 2010
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Blind Side warms heart, glosses over poverty
The Blind Side
Directed by John Lee Hancock
Starring Sandra Bullock, Tim McGraw, and Quinton Aaron
Now Playing
If you’re hoping for a good sports film, this movie isn’t the one you’re looking for, nor is it the one if you’re looking for strong issues, such as poverty and race, to be addressed. However, if you're in the mood for something that will have you leave the theatre with a smile on your face and you’re even the tiniest bit curious how Michael Oher — a once homeless and poverty-stricken teenager — got drafted into the NFL this year, feast your eyes upon The Blind Side.
The movie is based on Michael Lewis’ book The Blind Side: The Evolution of a Game, which is, itself, based on Oher’s real life. It’s pleasing to know that the 23-year-old Baltimore Raven is so successful, despite his troubled past.
In a way, this heart-warming movie seems almost too good to be true, as the very well-off Tuoly family (Sandra Bullock and Tim McGraw) take homeless Michael Oher (Quinton Aaron) into their home one cold winter night and end up adopting him. However, it’s even more reaffirming to know that this is based on a true story. This fact alone makes this movie incredible. The journey of Oher’s adoptive mom, Leigh Anne Tuoly (Bullock) is also one that's touching, as she transitions from a wealthy mama-knows-best attitude to experiencing Oher’s chilling, poverty-stricken neighborhood solely to get a sense of where he came from.
He was coincidentally enrolled into the same private Christian school the Tuoly kids attended, not because of his respectable GPA (a whopping 0.9), but because his towering 6-8, 300-plus lb. body was ideal for their football team. It's with the Tuoly family’s help (a.k.a. money) that he was able to attain many lifetime "firsts": his first bed, first home, and first football scholarship.
By skimming over the serious issues the film could have gone into and adding a dash of comedy, director John Lee Hancock, created the film as light and feel-good. The lack of detail on poverty and race front is appreciable. If they were any more present, the feel-good aspect of the film would have been lost. Instead, audiences can leave the theatre happy for the way Oher’s life turned out.
After watching YouTube videos of the real family (yes, my post-movie feel-good attitude took me that far), I realized how precise the cast was at depicting their real life counterparts. Bullock and McGraw did a great job with their roles as millionaire fast-food chain owners, as did Aaron as the quiet giant.
Although this movie seems fictitious and scenarios play out all too conveniently at times, The Blind Side is evidence for us pessimists that sometimes life really does work out for people.
Back Story to Blind Side?
By James MarshallThe Hollywood drama of the Blind Side makes for good movie plot, but what's the real story? I live in Memphis and find it very odd that out of the blue this woman stumbled upon a large young man one day and in miracle fashion decided to take him home and with her husband make him their own. The parents who "adopted" this young man were both Ole Miss alums, and in fact, the author of the book on which the movie is based is a friend of the parents and also has ties to Ole Miss. Of all the poor black kids in Memphis, it's odd to me that this large young man was plucked off the street, ernolled in a private school where he played football and then ended up going to Ole Miss where he was a star lineman. May sound negative, but I find it all too good to be true. There was obvious motive in this adoption and it began and ended with Ole Miss. If the parents wanted to do something truly special, they would have found a young needy child and given him or her the home they needed--minus all the glamour and glitter that their football star find has resulted in. In a word: greed. Both competitively for their college and for the dollars in selling the story to Hollywood.
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