'The Blind Side': Well Acted and Inspirational

I finally had a chance to be one of “those people.” You know the ones, they read the book and see the movie so they can say, with more than a twinge of superiority, “The book was so much better.” They’re also the same people that added the Walter Matthau-Robert Shaw version of “Taking of Pelham 1-2-3” to the Netflix queue about a month before the Travolta-Washington version hit the screens. You know, so they could say, “The original was better.” It’s of course true that the original was better, but I worked at a Blockbuster in Hollywood for five years and not once did anyone request that movie until the trailer for the remake hit multiplexes.

Anyway, I digress. Here’s what I think about “The Blind Side.”

The book was better. But the movie’s pretty daggum good too. I only read the book because a friend told me it would never work as a movie, anyway, and there was no point in waiting. My friend was right, the book is dense and wordy, and roughly half of it is about the evolution of the left tackle position in professional football. The Michael Oher stuff takes up the other half, and that’s what John Lee Hancock focuses on here. He gets the vast majority of it exactly right.

Sandra Bullock is well-cast as Leigh Anne Tuohy, a well-to-do Memphis interior decorator who takes in a homeless kid who is also a very hot football commodity. His name’s Michael Oher, and he’s immense. Huge. Massive. Surprisingly, he’s also quick on his feet, agile, and has a pretty sweet jump shot. The movie finds a clever way to use his hoops skills to introduce Michael to his future high school football coach, Coach Cotton.

The race and class issues are addressed, and as in the book, we get a sense of how political correctness has actually made these problems worse, not better. No one can seem to believe that the Tuohy’s take Michael in for any reason other than personal gain.

You know from the trailer and from real life that Michael is black. For some reason, this matters to a lot of people. And only some of them are openly racist.

The movie, like the book, contains textbook examples of Christian-minded conservatism in practice. Michael’s mom, it turns out, is addicted to crack cocaine. Leigh Anne meets Michael’s mom, and is remarkably non-judgmental. This is a great-ish performance from Bullock, playing an unapologetically conservative woman. Giving great support are Tim MacGraw as Leigh Anne’s husband, who was a star point guard for Ole Miss, and Ray McKinnon as the head ball coach. Newcomer Quinton Aaron excels as Michael Oher, a role that I thought would be nearly impossible to pull off. Several Southeastern Conference football coaches make cameos, to varying degrees of success. I wanted Georgia Coach Mark Richt to show up so that the actor playing Oher could lay him out and maybe knock some damn sense into him, but…

There’s bit of a scuttlebutt on BH over the swipe at George W. Bush. Some folks see it as a typically liberal slam of the former president. I didn’t know about this joke before watching the movie, and I found it rather innocuous. It was a federal government building, and W. was the head man at the time…didn’t bother me. In fact, one of Bush’s problems was that the Federal Government grew under his watch, and he wasn’t as conservative as advertised, so it didn’t bother me one little bit.

If you like football movies, this one’s better than “Remember the Titans,” not as good as “North Dallas Forty.” Good performances, some approaching great, and a lot of humor make this movie an inspirational choice for your family this Thanksgiving.