The Blind Side (2009) Review
4/10
A boy with nowhere to sleep is walking in the rain past a school gymnasium in Memphis. A woman stops her car. He moves into her house, is enrolled properly, is coached, and signs with Mississippi as an offensive tackle.
The 4 is for a film with real technical competence and a structural decision that determines everything about it. The film tells the story from the position of the person doing the helping, and gives the person being helped almost no interior life across two hours.
This one irritates me more than a plainly bad film would. The craft is real and Bullock is good, and the film is so pleased with its own kindness that it never notices it forgot to give Michael a point of view. A film about a young man’s life that treats him as furniture in somebody else’s story of generosity gets a 4 from me, and the competence is the only thing keeping it that high.
It also took around three hundred million dollars, was seen by an enormous number of people, and is the reason this entry is on the page instead of an obscure one.
Whose Film It Is
Leigh Anne Tuohy is the protagonist. She’s the arc, the opposition, the decisions and the change, and Michael Oher is the subject of them.
The evidence is in the scene count. Leigh Anne has conversations with her husband, her friends, a school administrator, a coach, an investigator and a drug dealer. Michael has almost no scene in which he’s alone or with somebody who’s not a Tuohy. The one exception is early, in the gymnasium, before the family appears. He’s alone, is looking for somewhere to sleep, and the film’s first five minutes contain the only version of him it’ll offer that’s not framed by somebody else.
The film delivers his interior life once, in an essay he writes near the end, which it has Leigh Anne largely dictate to him. That’s the structural problem in a single sequence. Somebody else supplies the character’s one articulation of his own experience.
The film also opens with Leigh Anne narrating the Lawrence Taylor play that gives it the title. That establishes the point of view before Michael appears on screen.
The Lawrence Taylor play is also a strange choice for a title sequence. It’s footage of Joe Theismann’s leg being broken, narrated as an explanation of why a left tackle matters, and the film opens on a white quarterback’s injury to explain a Black offensive lineman’s value.
That opening makes me wince. Somebody decided a Black teenager’s value should be explained with a white quarterback’s broken leg, in Leigh Anne’s voice, before we’ve even met him, and I can’t believe nobody on the production flagged it.
Count who has scenes alone. That’s the fastest diagnostic for whose story you’ve written, and it’s decided at the outline stage. If your subject never appears without your protagonist, they’re a situation instead of a character. The essay device is the clearest possible failure. A character’s single statement of their own experience mustn’t be authored inside the story by somebody else. Whoever narrates the opening owns the film. That decision is made before a word of dialogue.
Bullock Is Doing Real Work
The performance is the film’s best element and the rating isn’t a judgment on it. What she finds is the hardness. Leigh Anne is blunt, is used to being obeyed, enjoys the confrontations, and Bullock plays somebody whose generosity and her need to be in charge are the same trait instead of two.
The gun scene is the other one she carries. She confronts a dealer on his own street, isn’t frightened, and Bullock plays somebody whose confidence comes from never having been told no and not from courage. The restaurant scene is the best of it. Her friends make a remark, she responds by threatening them with the cost of their own reputations, and the scene is a woman who understands exactly which lever works on people like herself. The restaurant scene is the one I enjoyed most. Bullock knows exactly which lever to pull on those women, and she pulls it with relish. My problem is that the script never once asks her to be wrong about anything. What the part doesn’t require is doubt. Leigh Anne is right at every point, is never seriously opposed, and the film’s one attempt at a complication is an NCAA investigation that resolves in her favor.
The Investigation Is the Film’s One Good Idea
An NCAA investigator asks Michael whether the family steered him to Mississippi because they’re alumni and boosters, and for about ten minutes the film has something.
The question is a real one. The Tuohys are Ole Miss graduates and donors, they hired a tutor who pushed him toward the school, and the investigator’s suspicion is entirely reasonable.
The tutor is the mechanism the film gives the investigator. She’s hired by the family, is an Ole Miss alumna, states her allegiances out loud, and the film raises that conflict and then declines to follow it anywhere.
The film’s response is to have Michael state that he chose it himself because he wanted to be where his family was. That resolves the question emotionally instead of answering it. The scene where he walks out and confronts Leigh Anne about whether she did this for him or for the school is the only moment in the film where he’s a position she has to answer.
It’s also the only moment in the film where he’s angry, and the film gives him about ninety seconds of it before returning him to gratitude. Kathy Bates is in it as the tutor and is the film’s one source of complication that goes nowhere. She’s an Ole Miss alumna hired by the family, states her own allegiances, and the film raises the conflict and drops it.
The best scene in a weak work usually shows you what the work should have been. Ten minutes of the subject questioning his benefactor’s motives is a whole different film. Ask what happens if that scene is the premise instead of a complication.
An emotional resolution to a factual question is a common evasion and readers detect it. He’s asked whether he was steered and answers about how he feels.
Give your subject one position the protagonist must answer, and then don’t withdraw it in ninety seconds.
What Michael Oher Said
Oher has publicly objected to the film repeatedly and the objection is part of the record.
His stated complaint has been consistent. The film presents him as not understanding football when he arrived, when he’d played it, and depicts him as needing a child to teach him the game’s basic concepts. He’s said the portrayal affected how he was assessed professionally. The protective instinct scene is the one he’s objected to. The coach explains blocking by asking him to protect his family, and Oher’s position has been that he understood the position perfectly well and had played it. Both of those scenes bother me. They’re played for warmth, and I find them condescending in a way the film never seems to notice. A grown athlete gets his own sport explained to him by a child and by a coach reaching for a family metaphor, and the audience is meant to smile.
In 2023 he also filed a legal petition alleging that the Tuohys had placed him under a conservatorship instead of adopting him, and that he’d received nothing from the film. The Tuohys disputed the characterization and a Tennessee court ended the conservatorship.
The Tuohys have said they arranged the conservatorship on advice for NCAA eligibility reasons and that they shared proceeds, and the dispute over the accounting has been reported at length. The court record is the reliable part and the characterizations on both sides are contested.
None of that determines whether the film is good, and it does bear directly on the thing this review is about. A film that gave its subject no interior was made about somebody who has since said at length that it got him wrong.
Precious
Best Actress went to Bullock. Gabourey Sidibe was nominated for Precious and Meryl Streep for Julie and Julia, and this page argues for Sidibe.
The comparison is the page’s cleanest. Two films released in the same season about a Black teenager in difficulty, one told from the position of a white benefactor and one told from the position of the girl herself, and the Academy rewarded the lead performance in the first.
Both were also nominated for Best Picture that year. That means the membership had watched them and preferred the lead performance in the one told from outside. That’s the cleanest single piece of evidence this whole page contains about how the institution chooses when it’s been handed both of the available options in the same year.
The difficulty gap is also major. Sidibe had never acted, carried a film almost entirely in voiceover and withholding, and played a character whose interior life is the entire method. Bullock played a confident woman who’s right about everything.
Sidibe’s is the performance I’d have voted for, and the gap isn’t close in my eyes. She had to build a whole person from the inside, and Bullock was handed a woman the script never lets be wrong. Rewarding the easier job in the more comfortable film is the kind of choice that makes me distrust the Academy. The commercial gap explains the result. Three hundred million dollars against sixty-three, and a performance a hundred million people have seen competes differently from one voters had to seek out.
Quinton Aaron was also not nominated for anything. That’s consistent with the film’s structure. A performance given no interior to work with can’t be assessed, and the category system rewarded the person the script served.
The same subject from the benefactor’s position or the subject’s position produces two receptions, and the first is consistently preferred. This is the fourth instance on this page across thirty years. Interior life is the variable. One work gives the subject a voice and the other gives her a witness.
A performance in a film with a very large audience is competing on exposure as well as merit, and there’s no mechanism that separates the two.
It was also the first film with a solo female lead to pass three hundred million dollars domestically. That was the season’s dominant narrative about it and is a commercial fact instead of a critical one.
If your subject is a living person, they’ll eventually describe what you got wrong.
That’s worth considering at the outline stage instead of afterward. Michael Lewis wrote the book and it’s a considerably different object. It’s largely about the economics of the left tackle position and how the NFL came to value it, with the Oher story as one thread among several.
Should you watch The Blind Side?
For the Bullock performance only, and even that comes with a sigh from me. The 4 is for a film that sets its point of view in the opening narration and never gives it up, leaves its subject with almost no scene away from the family, hands him an essay somebody else dictates, and buries ten minutes of a good film in the third act. What frustrates me most is how close the better film was, sitting right there in the investigation scene.
