Of all the horror movies I watch, all the CG and rubber gore I rarely blink at, I felt an inescapable sense of dread at the start of The Blind Side and instinctively moved to cover my eyes. The film opens with Sandra Bullock’s Southern 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 (a moment that in the days before YouTube was still seen over and over again on television), the left tackle’s need to protect the quarterback’s blind side became much more important—hence much more valuable and financially lucrative.
And because of that, the real-life Michael 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 last spring. In fact, in one of those nifty little art-and-life serendipities, this past Monday evening I got home from a screening of The Blind Side—the wonderfully moving dramatization of Oher’s story—just in time to catch Oher himself live on TV, helping the Ravens crush the hapless Browns on Monday Night Football.
The Blind Side tells the true tale of young Michael 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 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.
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