The Blind Side
Following in the footsteps of prefab homes, the Hollywood machine has devised a wildly efficient way of dealing with the pressures of consumer demand. Welcome to the era of prefab movies, a disturbing development that is best evidenced by the arrival of The Blind Side, a sappy Sandra Bullock vehicle that feels more like a pastiche of past biopics and sport flicks than a fully realized and independent movie. If ever a shameless tearjerker movie were produced in a factory for mass consumption, this is it. You can practically see the sweat of exhausted assembly line workers printed on the celluloid.
The Blind Side is based on a true story (sorry, make that "extraordinary true story," since the poster demands it), which basically means that filmmaker John Lee Hancock (The Rookie) can punctuate a pile of facts with an overwhelming amount of fictional fluff. Truth is often stranger than fiction, but this moronic mixture of the two is just plain dull. Every scene, every moment, every montage (and there are a lot of them) plays out in a painfully predictable fashion.
The "extraordinary true story" is focused on Michael Oher (newcomer Quinton Aaron), a very large African American kid from a very broken family, who is treated to some good ol' Southern hospitality by a wealthy Caucasian family. The matriarch of the family is Leigh Anne Tuohy (Bullock), a fast-talking, no-nonsense interior designer with a heart of gold. Leigh Anne just wants to give Michael a chance to realize his dreams, which may or may not include using his hulking physique to play professional football. Michael just wants to be a part of a family. It's a match made in hokey Hollywood heaven!
With the initial setup out of the way, the movie is free to explore a seemingly endless array of clichés and stereotypes as Michael becomes further integrated into the family unit and the possibility of football fame looms on the horizon. Anyone familiar with the kind of "extraordinary true story" that interests Hollywood execs can see where this story is going before it even begins, so Hancock sits back and lets the story unfold as expected, content to deliver a narrative devoid of anything resembling a surprise.
But Hancock (who doubles as screenwriter, adapting the true story from the book by Michael Lewis) isn't just lazily obvious with his narrative trajectory. In addition to the preposterously predictable path that he puts the movie on, he even manages to bleed the movie of all dramatic authenticity, replacing genuine emotions with manipulative ones. Not only does Hancock want to force-feed his audience such vacuous drivel, but he wants to ensure that everyone knows exactly what feeling he wishes to evoke. All I ended up with was the feeling of bile rising in my throat.
Such emotional manipulation is especially transparent in a scene where Michael has to deal with a trash-talking redneck football player during a big game. We're clearly supposed to cheer for Michael and the attitude of the redneck player makes it pretty easy to root for the good guy, but Hancock takes it one step further by showing an unruly man hurling racial comments from the stands. Making sure to not miss any opportunity to tug at the audience's heartstrings, Hancock indicates that the racist man is actually the father of the redneck player on the field. Suddenly, Hancock has given us all two very big reasons to root for Michael, simply because his opponent is the son of a racist jerk.
This kind of manipulation always bothers me, because it feels entirely backwards. Shouldn't I cheer for Michael because he's a character worth caring about, as opposed to cheering for him because the only other option is to cheer for some really bad people? If Hancock had more faith in his actors or in his own ability to tell a story, then perhaps he wouldn't feel the need to commit such blatant acts of dramatic forgery. Hopefully, Hancock will eventually grow as a filmmaker, but the utter inanity that is his direction of this 128-minute blunder gives me little reason to hold my breath.
Sandra Bullock is about the only piece of this predictable puzzle who is deserving of some positive recognition. Her Southern accent is well done and she fills the screen with a commanding presence that makes it easy to accept Leigh Anne's aggressive attitude and fearless demeanour. But Bullock is merely good in a mostly dreadful movie, so while her performance is the best thing in The Blind Side, it's certainly not enough to save the movie from Hancock's gooey direction. This factory-made flick is without identity or originality, instead opting for familiarity and predictability. The era of prefab movies has begun and, like them or not, we can all thank John Lee Hancock for making all that emotional heavy lifting look so gratuitously generic.
