Someone Had To Say It

Back in March, after Sandra Bullock won the Academy Award for Best Actress for her role in Strong White Southern Woman Takes Care of a Young Black Man Because He’s Incapable of Doing it Himself The Blind Side, I finally caved and saw the film.  It was exactly what I expected it to be from the first trailer that I saw for it.  It was a sappy, seven hour (it may have been less, but when it comes to movies, time is a feeling, not a fact) exaggerated Hallmark card dedicated to the glory of white people.  This film absolutely did not live up to the hype that it received from the public.  Friends of mine described it as “a really good movie” and their “fave movie of the year.” 

Now, Sandra Bullock’s performance in this film is fine, for a B-movie.  I don’t think it was Oscar-worthy; if her performance is the precedent for the next award, Miley Cyrus will probably end up winning for her turn in The Last Song.  Also, if the criterion for the Best Actress award this year came down to an accent and a bad haircut, then the award should have gone to Mariah Carey. (But in all seriousness it should have gone to Carrie Mulligan.)

One of the reasons I have heard for why Bullock deserved the Oscar is that "she's been in the business for a long time."  Well you know who else has been or was in the business without ever winning an Oscar or even being nominated?  A whole lot of actresses.  Myrna Loy was never nominated.  Barbara Stanwyck was nominated four times, Glenn Close has been nominated five times; neither of them won.  And Lauren freaking Bacall only received one nomination her entire career.  Being in the business a long time is not a qualification for being awarded the statue for Best Actress.  

To my credit, because I’m sure the general public disagrees with me on this (but really, what do we all collectively know about film?  I know people who think that Psycho is a horrible film and that Dr. Strangelove isn’t funny—these people deserve lobotomies), The Blind Side currently maintains a score of 53 on Metacritic.com.  While this is not horrible, it is a clear indicator that The Blind Side only scored so well with audiences because of the fact it was cheap and shameless and that’s just what people want because it’s easy.  The entire time I watched the film (although I could have turned it off at any point in time, but I think I deserve major brownie points for watching the whole thing) I couldn’t help but feel that I was being force-fed dribble. 

You’d think that this movie was going to focus on its supposed protagonist Michael Oher, but you’d be wrong.  Quite early in the film, it pulls a 1-2 punch on you and surprise! this movie is really all about Sandra Bullock and her bad haircut.  (No, I’m not letting the haircut thing go.  I live in Utah and am subjected to seeing it all the time and it’s ugly and I hate it and I want it gone.)  So I guess you could say that you get blind sided by The Blind Side, just like Sandra Bullock and the whole marriage-falling-apart-thing (ouch, too soon?)  This is supposed to be a pseudo-bio-pic of Michael Oher, right?  Then why is his character reduced to what is probably two pages of actual dialog?  The film that supposedly is about him ends up leaving you knowing nothing about him.

Also, I’d just watched Precious the night before I watched The Blind Side, and Precious is a hard, hard film full of rage, courage and just a sliver of hope.  So whenever the “thugs” and “gangstas” appeared in The Blind Side I couldn’t help but think Mo’nique would totally own all of these guys in a fight.

My sentiments of this film echo that of those of Melissa Anderson in The Village Voice, “[The] movie peddles the most insidious kind of racism, one in which whitey’s are virtuous saviors, coming to the rescue of African-Americans who became superfluous in narratives that are supposed to be about them.”

The Blind Side is nothing more than a stock inspirational tale that is trite and manipulative.  Manipulative in the fact that it is clearly designed to make suburban moms feel better about themselves for being so “lucky” and having “so much stuff” and being able to afford to shop at the Costco. It treats its rightful protagonist as nothing more than a vehicle for telling the story of a strong, white woman.  This film is middle-class pandering at its cheapest.