I love movies. And almost as much as I love movies, I love to hate movies. My blood is constantly hovering a few degrees shy of boiling point when it comes to the worst that cinema has to offer, especially those offerings that are generally loved. So lets start things off with a doozy, perhaps the worst much loved film of 2009, The Blind Side.
This is not one of those films that I hate because it was poorly thrown together, not well thought out, badly executed, etc. This is one of those films whose vileness is disguised with great subtlety. Allow me to explain.
Blind Side is not badly written. It isn't badly acted or badly directed. Sure it is sentimental but that makes films irrelevant, not egregious. No this film plays all the right cards to make the poison taste just like honey.
Sandra Bullock does an admirable job at accurately, convincingly, even astonishingly portraying the upper-crust, middle aged, southern, white, bossy matriarch. I lived in the south (Tennessee) for 13 years and instantly recognized the real thing when Bullock appeared on the screen.
Of course also immediately obvious was the touching sports/rags to riches saga formula. I will admit a bias here. I hate sports films. Almost as much as a I hate true story films. But the strange thing about this film is that somehow it managed to avoid the pitfalls that cripple nearly all of the films in those genres.
No, this film forges it's own tunnel into awfulness. Bullock's Leigh Anne Fouhy could be a great character in a film that understood who she is. This is the film that she would have made and that is the problem. It is exactly how she sees herself, the queen of spunk and sass who knows what's best and does what's right in a quirky way. The film cannot separate itself from the pedestal that it places her on. It is like a biography of a celebrity being written by a drooling obsessed fan. The events, the characters, the plot, are an exact mirror of the image that people try to project of themselves, the false one. It is a life size simulacra from top to bottom.
I am really making a larger contention here than that this is a terrible film. My contention is that it is a terrible film because it perpetuates the lie that what people think is real about other peoples' lives is real. The whole point of narrative art is to give us unique access to people and their interactions that we couldn't witness normally, or even firsthand if we were there. This gives us nothing but a big budget version of the facade without the least hint that it is a facade.
I do not care if a film sticks to the facts, or its source material. Often those things get in the way of the truth that's in the story. However in this case they abandoned fact for botoxed myth: IMDB states "Oher was less than pleased by the movie's depiction of him as passive, unskilled big guy who was only barely acquainted with football." And yet that's what everything hinges on, sassy saviour swoops in to save starving simpleton. According to the film she taught him to play. The fact that that didn't happen, in fact far from it, means these filmmakers bent over backwards to keep their simulacra intact.
We have here the myth of the nobel savage (sociological speak for the idolization of the simple, uncultured, uneducated), the myth of rich white benevolence, and of course a celebration of the twisted thing known as "family values" that has become some combination of the American Dream (have it all, and your dignity too) and lip-service Christianity.
The hollow shell that resulted is close enough to reality for people to believe it and far enough from it to keep any truth from getting through.
