Post-Grad

On The Blind Side

I spent like two hours working on this for some other hole in the internet, so I thought I would put it up here as I haven’t had a long post in a while. This has been a slow, yet virulent poison in my brain, gaining ground over the months. I finally got to drain the vitriol and shape it into an argument. 

Disagree.

I dare you.

I stared at this screen deciding to write a review and, honestly, I felt my blood pressure rise and my cheeks become flushed as I remembered this movie. If you’ve seen the trailer or even heard what it’s about, you know how it ends, so I don’t care about spoilers. I’m going to try to withhold the seething rage, not type all in caps, and give a marked argument as to why I think this is an insult to the film industry, race relations, and America.

You know the same tired old story. Rich white lady with thick southern accent sees very large black boy walking along the side of the street in the rain. She takes him home, promises her husband that she’ll walk him every night and makes sure he gets fed …………. Okay, that was a bit of the rage there…….. and exhale. So she takes him in, ends up enrolling him in her children’s school, tries to get him to play football, does get him to play football, he plays football, there is the slightest bit of trouble that is easily overcome, and a family is forged in the purifying fires of opulent wealth. True story.

There are three main problems with this movie in terms of theme and writing.

First, of course, there is the fact that the movie completely revolves around a white family taking in a black child and him becoming successful through this. I would like to handle this matter carefully, because I do realize it is a true story, and I do not want to demean the intention or the emotional strain and hardship this undertaking must have put on the real life family, because ultimately, it is a remarkable sacrifice and a very inspirational display of charity. The problem with the movie is that it is so shallowly displayed on so many levels. The bulletproof white family picks up the mangy dog, gives him a makeover, takes off his glasses, lets his hair down, and he’s prom queen! The rough edged fancy lady with a heart of gold bends her husbands will to hers, cause he don’t know no better no way. It is a shameless shadow of what the real situation must of been and all things are starkly drawn in black and white, pun intended. it has been several months since i’ve seen the movie, but I cannot remember there being any positive black roles besides the main character that does that football trick. If a black character is not neutral in the movie, as I’m remembering, they are instigatingly negative. In fact, I believe that black roles are the only ones that provide any significant conflict within the movie (There are the snarky rich lady friends, but they don’t affect anything, and I’ll get to them in a bit) which could easily be seen as black people trying to put a stop to a courageous white family trying to pull a black boy up through the downward spiral and into the safe have of white land, where everyday is Monday and there is a mayonnaise tap on the sink.

Coinciding with this two dimensional portrayal is the off putting blankness, characterless, and sometimes lifelessness of Michael, the boy the family takes in. I suppose he was meant to be shy but through out the movie, he bordered on catatonic. His two defining characteristics were that he could play football and he was black. These are really and truly the only things that are reflected in his character. Sure he smiles-ish sometimes, and I think he might have cried once, but there is unapologetically no exploration of what he thinks about all of this, there is no thought to who he really is as a person, hell I don’t think they ever even answered if he really liked playing football.

The second problem, and the most insulting I believe, is that in many ways this movie was like a special treat for non racist people. I watched it in a full theater, and the people there were in full empathy mode, white guilt switched on, ready to defend this defenseless minority. Throughout the film there are multiple scenes that highlight a flagrantly racist person doing their due diligence to Michael through their hateful ignorance. I honestly remember the people in the theater around me, tsking to themselves, hissing quietly, and shaking their heads murmuring “mmm mmm mmm” in disapproval. In all of these scenes however, these blatant bigots get their comeuppance either through the actions of other righteous characters or through the swift justice of the universe. Because the universe doesn’t take kindly to racists. The audience around me erupted in laughter. That’s what you get! We would never do that! How dare you be so mean to a black person! Aren’t you watching this movie!? A good white person feeds the black people! They don’t make fun! Anti-racism is the new racism. This movie felt like an enormous concerted effort to make white audiences, because that is definitely who this movie was meant for, feel good about all the things white people can do for black people. This movie felt like you were being patted on the head for not being racist. This movie was overtly anti-racist, and I think that causes just as much divisiveness as racism. This movie said so very loudly, like an American yelling to a non English speaker in a foreign country, “WE WHITE PEOPLE DO NOT, WE DO NOT, AT ALL, HATE YOU BLACK PEOPLE. DO YOU WANT SOME OF OUR SYMPATHY AND MONEY?”

The third problem coincides with the other two, and undoes the movie completely. Namely, there is no conflict in the movie. There are no real world consequences or problems. Time and again, the movie attempts to show vague flashbacks of Michael’s life, trying to show in very small snippets, how horrible it must have been, but this comes no where close to showing any sort of problems he might have had. Michael runs away, blankly, one time and there are very mean and bad black people trying to get him to do drugs, he get mad, fights, and leaves. There is a small hiccup in when Michael goes to college, as it turns out that Sandra Bullock might have just taken him in just to get him to play at her alma mater. This was the foremost conflict in the movie, and it was a preposterous notion, and Michael believed it for one minute and then everything was fine. It was so convenient. It was open 24 hours and next door. It was a clean flowing drive with the slightest speed bump every 400 miles. The problem was that the drive was through hell. There were no imaginable consequences throughout the movie, there was no danger. And this ultimately made there no reason to watch the movie, unless you wanted to feel good about not hating black people.

I would like you to imagine my intense, blood pressure rising wrath at the thought that this would be considered for a best picture oscar.

Notes

1. replica---watches liked this
2. posteriori posted this