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It’s a shameless button-pusher, but pushes them well. The Blind Side throws the weight of its big, powerful heart behind a feel-good story, blocking out most doubts about veracity or racial patronization. The result does indeed feel good.

[The following is a REPRINT of redblog's review of The Blind Side on its theatrical release last fall. The DVD is now available for rental from redbox.]

The Blind Side opens with Sandra Bullock’s syrup-drenched voice over, but on screen we’re seeing an old NFL film. Look, it’s the Redskins and there’s John Riggins, so it must be from the ‘80s. Yep, there’s Joe Theismann… and it’s a night game… which means a Monday night game… and… oh my god no… they’re playing the Giants… and there’s L.T…. Every football fan over 30 remembers what comes next, and as Bullock’s character explains in her narration, it changed professional football and Michael Oher’s life.

Thanks to that oh-god-cover-your-eyes moment live on Monday Night Football–when Joe Theismann’s shin suddenly went 90 degrees the wrong way–the left tackle’s need to protect the quarterback’s blind side became much more important and hence much more valuable and financially lucrative. And because of that, the real-life Oher, a hulking, surprisingly quick mountain of a man, went from living on the streets at age 16 to avoid daily life in the projects to becoming a first-round draft pick for the Baltimore Ravens in ’09.

The Blind Side tells the true tale of young Oher (Quentin Aaron), a looming giant growing up in a solemn, silent self-protective cocoon. Big Mike, as he’s called by others, goes anywhere in the Memphis night to escape his mother’s broken home, but he’s not getting anywhere. Then Oher is given a couch to sleep on for a night by Leigh Anne Touhy (Bullock), an interior designer, Taco Bell-franchise socialite, and a bona fide bull-headed, Ol’ Miss-loving, Southern belle. Michael’s night on the expensive Touhy Family couch turns into two, then a week, then a month, as all the Touhys end up helping the behemoth of a boy find his place first in the classroom and only later on the gridiron. (Football is barely mentioned during the film’s first half.)

Based on the book The Blind Side: The Evolution of a Game by Michael Lewis, the film is written and directed by John Lee Hancock (The Rookie) with a sure hand for negotiating obvious sports-movie clichés past the overly dopey. The Blind Side may draw its inspiration from how Oher’s quiet, mammoth gentleness hides deep, protective strength, but its tone comes at you like Lawrence Taylor himself, bearing down with every heavy pound of crushing, inescapable power.

If you dismiss The Blind Side as pure sap, and you’d be half-right. It is sappy–it’s also a little too broad-stroke whitewashed with feel-good racial Kumbaya. But it’s also undeniably effective and touching. It’s out to make you cry with joy for those rare cases when human compassion wins out over life’s unrelenting march of pragmatic cynicism.

But at least you feel you’ve been manipulated by a pro. You may see all the set ups coming, but Hancock makes most of them pay off so powerfully, you’ll forgive the film’s lack of subtlety. “Sure we’re going to hit you hard with 300 pounds of warm, uplifting, heart-felt sports homilies and life lessons,” says The Blind Side, “but don’t worry—you’ll love us for it.”

Country singer Tim McGraw is clean-shaven unrecognizable as Leigh Anne’s good-natured, supportive husband, but he and the other actors portraying the family do solid work–including the requisite “cute kid,” Jae Head. Often dismissed as a one-note, journey-woman actress, Bullock is firing on all sassy cylinders here, portraying Leigh Anne Touhy as a bossy, force of nature–harnessed and focused in the service of what she feels is right. Bullock’s Leigh Anne may have moments of doubt about whether she’s acting out of white liberal guilt, but she never lets her human failings stop her from stubbornly pushing forward.

In head-to-head combination with Precious–that much rawer, more devastating look at how an individual might try to improve him or herself up out of crushing poverty and abuse–The Blind Side cannot help but feel a little cheap and maybe too feel-good for its own good. Michael is presented as often mute and inscrutable so that The Blind Side can instead tell his story from Leigh Anne’s box-office safe point of view. We end up knowing little about the Inner Michael other than he’s big and kind and a great protector on and off the field. That’s only going to intensify cries of subversive racism: the film can be seen as yet another Hollywood-ized tale of a saintly White Person who rides in to “save” the poor Black child.

Those arguments may be worth discussing, but The Blind Side throws its considerable weight not at such tricky social issues, but rather on the side of human uplift. When I can sit and watch a film that uses both a way-too-on-the-nose Ferdinand the Bull reference and an extended cameo from Nick Saban and I still come away grinning from ear to ear and tearing up, then you know you’ve got a movie whose massive, unrelenting heart, at least on first viewing, pushes most of its flaws out of the way.

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