The Blind Side (2009) Review

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 story is told from the position of the person doing the helping, and the person being helped is given almost no interior life across two hours.

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 has 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 is alone or with somebody who is not a Tuohy.

The one exception is early, in the gymnasium, before the family appears. He is alone, is looking for somewhere to sleep, and the film’s first five minutes contain the only version of him it will offer that is not framed by somebody else.

His interior life is delivered once, in an essay he writes near the end, which the film has Leigh Anne largely dictate to him. That is the structural problem in a single sequence. The character’s one articulation of his own experience is supplied by somebody else.

The film also opens with Leigh Anne narrating the Lawrence Taylor play that gives it the title, which establishes the point of view before Michael appears on screen.

The Lawrence Taylor play is also a strange choice for a title sequence. It is 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.

Bullock Is Doing Real Work

The performance is the film’s best element and the rating is not 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, is not 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.

What the part does not 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 are 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 is 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, which 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 has a position she has to answer.

It is also the only moment in the film where he is 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 is an Ole Miss alumna hired by the family, states her own allegiances, and the film raises the conflict and drops it.

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 had played it, and depicts him as needing to be taught the game’s basic concepts by a child. He has said the portrayal affected how he was assessed professionally.

The protective instinct scene is the specific one he has 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.

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 had received nothing from the film. The Tuohys disputed the characterization and the conservatorship was ended by a Tennessee court.

The Tuohys have said the conservatorship was arranged on advice for NCAA eligibility reasons and that proceeds were shared, 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, which means the membership had watched them and preferred the lead performance in the one told from outside, which is the cleanest single piece of evidence this whole page contains about how the institution chooses when it has been handed both of the available options in the same year.

The difficulty gap is also substantial. 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 is right about everything.

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, which is consistent with the film’s structure. A performance given no interior to work with cannot be assessed, and the category system rewarded the person the script served.

Should you watch The Blind Side?

For the Bullock performance only. A film that establishes its point of view in the opening narration and never surrenders it, a subject with almost no scene away from the family, an essay about his own experience that somebody else dictates, and ten minutes of a good film buried in the third act.

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