The Blind Side: Sandra Bullock, Get Off the Gridiron!

Warner Bros.

Bullock tries to do good, fails.

Details

Opens at Metro and other theaters, Fri., Nov. 20. Rated PG-13. 126 minutes.

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More About

• Quinton Aaron
• Sandra Bullock
• Michael Lewis
• Memphis McMansion
• Racial Issues

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Another poor, massive, uneducated African-American teenager lumbers onto screens this month, soon after Precious and obviously timed as a pre-Thanksgiving dinner lesson in the Golden Rule. But unlike Claireece Precious Jones and her howling rage, The Blind Side's Michael "Big Mike" Oher (Quinton Aaron) is mute, docile, and ever-grateful to the white folks who took him in. Based on a true story recounted in Michael Lewis' 2006 book of the same name, Blind Side the movie peddles the most insidious kind of racism, one in which whiteys are virtuous saviors coming to the rescue of African-Americans who become superfluous in narratives that are supposed to be about them. Steel magnolia Leigh Anne Tuohy (Sandra Bullock, frosted and thickly accented) welcomes the homeless Big Mike into her family's Memphis McMansion, later explaining to him how to play left tackle. In every scene, Oher is instructed, lectured, comforted, or petted like a big puppy; he is merely a cipher (Aaron has at most two pages of dialogue), the vehicle through which the kind-hearted but imperfect whites surrounding him are made saintlier. "Am I a good person?" Leigh Anne asks her husband non-rhetorically—as if every second of this film wasn't devoted to canonizing her.