John Lee Hancock (2009)

Twenty years or so ago, when films about handicapped people seemed to be particularly in vogue, you could always rely on some reviewers to insist that the latest treatment was, mirabile dictu and unlike its predecessors, lacking in mawkishness.  As I remember, these films – with the shining exception of My Left Foot – were reliably mawkish, and crudely manipulative.   In The Blind Side, an affluent white Memphis family adopts an apparently ESN black teenager, who’s spent his life with a succession of foster parents, and sees him achieve his potential as a football player and win a sports scholarship to college.  John Lee Hancock’s picture, a huge box-office success in America, doesn’t represent (or, let’s hope, herald) a sub-genre similar to the cinema of Oscar-winning disability but I’ve seen reviews which praise it for surprising sensitivity and discretion.  I think my memory of the reception of the Rain Man family of pictures, the ‘blind’ in the title and these admiring notices combined to make me suspicious of this film – suspicions that the trailer, which I’d seen half a dozen times, had done nothing to dispel.   And by the time I saw it a few days ago, I was also angrily prejudiced against The Blind Side because it had won Sandra Bullock the Best Actress Oscar that I desperately wanted Meryl Streep to get.  I was still shocked by what a lousy piece of work it is.

Based-on-an-amazing-true-story but made for cinema so that it’s an incredibly false one, The Blind Side doesn’t consider the feelgood factor as something to be earned – it drip feeds it to the audience.   At one point, Michael, newly adopted by Leigh Anne and Sean Tuohy, crashes a car in which the Tuohys’ much younger (biological) son Sean Jr (SJ) is a passenger.  When Leigh Anne receives a phone call at work (she’s an interior designer) and dashes to the scene of the accident, you’re primed for trauma.   Michael is sitting, distraught but uninjured, at the side of the road; paramedics are gathered around the supine body of SJ.   Once Leigh Anne reaches him, SJ looks up and says mischeviously (and improbably):  ‘Mom, d’you think the blood’ll come outta this shirt?’  It’s moments like these that give confounding expectations a bad name.  In a similar way, I thought that taking Michael into their lives might at least be presented as some kind of challenge to the Tuohys’ conservatism and Christianity, which they then proved they were able to rise to.  In fact they’re so impeccably Christian that no one – not the parents, not their teenage daughter Collins (sic), not SJ, whom you might at least hope would show a glimmer of childish fickleness – ever turns a hair about having Michael move in.

The effects of the Tuohys’ social radicalism on their relationships within the community of which they’re part are virtually invisible because they have next to no family and neither Collins nor SJ nor their father has any friends to speak of.  There’s a trio of women with whom Leigh Anne lunches a couple of times and whose sole purpose is to demonstrate how benighted and selfish they are compared with her.  (The trouble with this kind of set-up is that the characters of the other women are so clumsily conceived that you don’t believe they could ever have been friends with the heroine.  The same thing happened with the heartless highflyers Amy Adams met with for lunch in Julie and Julia.  The favoured menu selection in both cases is a salad, which seems virtually to symbolise moral meagreness.)

John Lee Hancock, who also wrote the screenplay (from a book by Michael Lewis), wants to have it both ways, and does.  Most people in Memphis except the Tuohys, the school football coach and a couple of Michael’s teachers seem to be racist or at least racially unenlightened.    The local mores may be deplorable but the criticism of them is weightless because everyone but the Tuohys is firmly in the background:  it’s they who are ready to change their lives and who are on screen all the time.  Because the Tuohys represent conservative values and triumph pretty well uninterruptedly, the film is unlikely to offend conservative audiences.  But the family’s Christianity is unobtrusive enough to ensure these values don’t get in the way of the film’s having a broader popular appeal.  Although Sandra Bullock has been quoted as saying she had doubts about playing Leigh Anne Tuohy because she didn’t share her faith, this couldn’t have been that much of a problem for Bullock:  all she’s asked to do is wear a cross on a chain, say grace at Thanksgiving, and at one point mention that she’s in a prayer group with the District Attorney.  At the very end, her voiceover tells us that she has God to thank for what happened – she then modifies this to God and a (real life) American footballer called Lawrence Taylor.

Just when he looks set to enter the University of Mississippi, Michael gets called in for interview by the NCAA.  The staging is so sinister that physical torture looks to be the next thing on the agenda of the woman official who grills Michael and the exchange is so aggressively overdone that I misunderstood what the NCAA was – I thought (especially because the official was African-American) that it must be some nefarious, liberal-do-gooding set-up[1].   The NCAA woman tells Michael that the Tuohys only wanted him to go to ‘Ole Miss’ rather than the University of Tennessee because it’s the Tuohys’ alma mater.  This shocking revelation is enough to send the disillusioned Michael briefly back to the poverty-stricken, drink-and-drugs-ridden area of Memphis he hails from – which Hancock presents as hell on earth, with inhabitants to match.   The only point of these sequences seems to be to give a momentary whack of feelbad factor sufficient to require an antidote of uplift strong enough to turn things around for the happy ending.  Is it a reason for Michael to feel betrayed by the Tuohys – or in any way unusual – for them to have a soft spot for their old college and an antipathy towards its main regional rival?  It’s noticeable that, while the remarkable improvement in Michael’s grade point average could be taken as a vindication of the education provided by Christian schools in Tennessee, the crucial leap forward (the one that pushes his GPA just above the 2.5 needed for college entrance) is thanks not to boring old schoolteachers, or even the private tutor the Tuohys have hired, but to Sean, who remembers enjoying ‘The Charge of the Light Brigade’ at high school and gets Michael interested in it too.  The Tennyson poem ‘means something’ emotionally to Michael – that’s an instant passport to improving his essay-writing skills.

In terms of visual ambition, this might be a TV movie – and in terms of the moral-of-the-story and characterisation in the minor roles, a pretty old one.  The conversations in the school staffroom, for example, take you back decades and Jae Head as the peppy, plucky SJ even further – to the days when audiences were expected to respond to child actors like performing animals. (John Lee Hancock clearly knows what some people still want on both sides of the Atlantic:  the sounds coming from the audience in the Richmond Odeon suggested they were lapping up everything this kid did – because he was a kid.)  To be honest, this seems meant to be part of the appeal of the massively gentle Michael too – when we see him and the shrimp SJ together, we’re expected to react as if the little boy had got a dumbly affectionate new dog.  (Even while he’s a no-hoper at school, Michael scores in the ninety-eighth percentile in ‘protective instincts’.)  Quinton Aaron, who plays Michael, was twenty-five when the film was made and looks older.  His bulk works well enough, in a cartoon giant way, in the football sequences (although the pivotal one of these goes on too long).  Otherwise, he gives a weak, inexpressive performance, which looks worse because The Blind Side has come out at the same time as Precious, where another very large young black actor justifies her casting way beyond physical suitability for the role.

So how is Sandra Bullock as Leigh Anne?   She’s very skilful:  sometimes the musicality of her line readings is pleasing and she’s nicely controlled throughout.   When there’s a chance for some physical comedy, Bullock takes it without overdoing things – as in the scene when Leigh Anne pushes other adolescent football players into various positions on the school playing field to demonstrate to Michael how it’s done (in a way that his coach – of course – isn’t able to do).  When Leigh Anne visits Michael’s biological mother to talk about adopting the boy, Bullock has a fine moment as the woman weeps and Leigh Anne comes to sit next to her.  Bullock reaches out her hand tentatively – you see this is something Leigh Anne hasn’t done before, with a poor black woman anyway, and which she doesn’t find easy to do.  But this kind of depth is unusual.  Bullock’s emotional and expressive range is limited and, although Stephanie Zacharek has praised her work as a wonderful portrait of an ordinary woman, you’re always aware that a Hollywood star is peeping out from behind.   Sandra Bullock was fortunate even to be nominated for an Oscar.   Tim McGraw gives a decent performance as Sean (and you sense he really enjoys working with Bullock), as does Ray McKinnon as the coach.  Kathy Bates is OK as Miss Sue, Michael’s tutor, although her heart clearly isn’t in what’s a pretty demeaning role.  (There’s a terrible ‘humorous’ moment when Miss Sue reveals to Leigh Anne that she’s a Democrat and Leigh Anne musters just enough self-control to say ‘Thank you for being honest with me’.)  Carter Burwell, the man who scores Coens’ pictures, must be a true professional to have written the music required of him here.

28 March 2010

[1] According to Wikipedia, the National Collegiate Athletic Association ‘is a semi-voluntary association of 1,281 institutions, conferences, organizations and individuals that organizes the athletic programs of many colleges and universities in the United States and Canada’.