February 4, 2010: The Blind Side
I’ve generally been happy over the past decade or so, as the modern generation of actresses came into their own and started winning Oscars. Helen Hunt, Gwyneth Paltrow, Julia Roberts, Halle Berry, Nicole Kidman, Hilary Swank and Charlize Theron all deservedly took home Oscar gold. The one that stuck in my craw was Reese Witherspoon, not necessarily because she isn’t a capable actress, although I do see her as being a notch lower than the others, but because the performance itself (in the 2005 film Walk the Line) didn’t strike me one way or the other. So as soon as I heard the Oscar buzz around Sandra Bullock’s performance in The Blind Side, that dread welled up in me, because it was another case of an actress who I think of as being a notch below the others, possibly taking home the gold for an inferior performance.
Well, I needn’t have feared that the world would fail to disappoint me, because Bullock is going to get her Oscar for The Blind Side, and I’m not going to be very happy about it. It does occur to me that the caricatured portrayal lacking any nuance may be a result of the actual person portrayed being exactly like that, but if so, then I’m disappointed in the whole world for letting such narcissistic blowhards get all the attention.
The Blind Side is the true story of a Tennessee boy with an unstable home life and poor grades, who ends up living with a wealthy family and being discovered to be fairly smart, and who also turns out to be a pretty good football player. The film’s title refers to his particular football position, where his job is to protect the quarterback’s blind side while he gets ready to throw the ball, a job which requires speed and immense size and a protective instinct. “Big Mike” has all of these, and that makes him a very attractive recruiting prospect for the colleges. Mike adjusts to his new family, which includes a young boy and a teenaged girl, and is eventually adopted by them, at the behest of Sandra Bullock’s overbearing mother figure.
This is a touching story, to be sure, but it plays very broadly here and didn’t really speak to me. The hackneyed presentation is a problem, from the precocious young kid to the aloof but secretly sensitive teenaged daughter, topped off by Bullock’s stereotypical Memphis society ladies who can’t fathom how their friend could handle taking in an African-American boy as part of the family. But what really kills this movie for me is the lack of clarity around Bullock’s character’s motivation. I guess she’s on the up-and-up, but this generosity seems out of character. We don’t know anything else about her history aside from hints at her tenacity once she decides to do something, but we don’t know what drives her. There’s a suggestion that it’s good old fashioned Christianity, which could explain what’s going on, but things are rarely that simple. Maybe she’s just a rare person, but not a likeable one, and putting on a southern accent and acting larger than life shouldn’t bring Oscar gold on its own. Maybe I was supposed to like her. I didn’t.
I’m not keen on this one.
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