The Blind Side

The Blind Side (2009; dir. John Lee Hancock) offers another melodrama about white and black folks getting acquainted in the American South. The message: mutual interdependence will make us better people. In the film, a conservative, wealthy Christian woman befriends a large and passive African American boy who is practically a street person. She feels sorry for him. His mother is an addict, and his father is nowhere to be seen. When she sees him walking down the street in the rain and asks where he is headed, he answers that he is going to the gym. She knows the gym is closed and realizes he has nowhere to sleep. To the surprise of her family, she offers to let him stay at her house for the night, and then for as long as he wants. She buys him clothes, pays his tuition at the local private school that her children attend, and ultimately she and her husband become his legal guardians. He calls her Mom, and she calls him her son.

There is much potential for sentimentality and stereotyping here, but though the film has its sentimental moments it for the most part evades both pitfalls. The characters run contrary to type. The woman, Leigh Anne Tuohy, is exactly the sort of person you’d expect to have no interest at all in homeless black kids. Michael Oher, the kid she takes in, is not your stereotypical street-smart black teen-ager. He’s shy, unassertive, and virtually never talks. He’s been bruised and traumatized by his difficult life. School bores him because he’s convinced he can’t do the work. He’s given up on himself and on life—he’s fundamentally depressed. Most of all he’s alone. Tuohy would undoubtedly say that Christian charity is why she took Oher in, and the movie offers no alternative explanation. It’s fairly free of platitudes and points of view. It speaks through the actions of its characters.

I dreaded watching this film for three reasons: it was about football, it featured Sandra Bullock, and because of the first two reasons the advertised length seemed too much to ask. It’s difficult to conceive of a subject less interesting on film than football. Unless it is golf, or maybe bowling. And Sandra Bullock, well, I’m just not a fan. On all three counts, the film won me over. Football is an issue, but only a minor one. Sandra Bullock, though she still plays another version of herself, is fully convincing as Tuohy. Quinton Aaron, who plays Oher, is excellent. There’s not tremendous depth to this film, but there is a winning and earnest sincerity. Sincere films normally drive me howling out of the theater. But in this case I was entertained and moved.

But perhaps also I was seduced, lulled, by the vulnerability of Oher, by Tuohy’s earnest concern for his well-being, into overlooking other aspects of the film. In a sense, by choosing characters that run counter to type or stereotype, the film is able to avoid specific commentary on race and economic disparities. It’s focused on individuals, not on their social and racial contexts. Tuohy never comes to any realization about the conditions of life in the projects—she knows something about the projects because she visits them twice in the film. She even threatens a drug dealer. She sees Oher as someone who needs help, and she responds to him on that basis. Oher’s passive vulnerability wins our sympathy, and as he begins responding to Tuohy’s efforts to help him, we like him all the better, but that’s because he’s trying to become the kind of person Tuohy wants him to be. When he becomes a member of her family, he does so primarily on her terms, not his.

I have no arguments with Christian charity. But in this film it operates on the premise that people like Oher are victims incapable of raising themselves up without the white folks’ help. Moreover, where the victims are raised up to is defined by the white folks too—eating well, living in a nice house, showing courtesy and manners, studying, attending college, acting like white folks. This is made all the more clear in how the film divides its characters into categories: the rich white people on the one side, the poor and drug-addicted black folks in the projects on the other side. In this film, solving the problems of the projects means getting people like Oher to live and be like their white benefactors. I am oversimplifying, but my point is that The Blind Side does not argue for social change. There is nothing radical or even moderately progressive about its solution to social problems. It argues the case of the Good Samaritan. Be good to people fallen by the wayside, but pay no attention to how they got there, to their ethnic or social origins.

Oher’s immense size automatically makes his high school football coach see him as a valuable addition to the team. He convinces the school admissions officer to admit Oher, despite his academic problems. (The football coach is played by Ray McKinnon, who played the title character in The Accountant, 2001, and in the recent film That Evening Sun, 2009). In fact, Oher is so shy and unaggressive that he bumbles around during practice and during games. Tuohy finally realizes that he’s afraid of hurting other people, so she persuades him to think of his team as his family, which he must defend. This does the job. The white lady shows the black kid how to play football and rise to his potential.

The Blind Side at moments seems almost aware of its disingenuousness. Tuohy and her husband as graduates of the University of Mississippi are archly fierce football fans. They want all their children, including Oher, to attend the school. Tuohy early on recognizes that Oher might qualify for a football scholarship to Ole Miss, and she does everything she can to help him qualify, which primarily means giving him pep talks and hiring a tutor (another arch Ole Miss fan) to help him with his studies. When an NCAA officer tells Oher that the Tuohy’s might have befriended him solely so that he could play football at Ole Miss, there is a genuine crisis. Oher wonders whether his new family loves him after all. And Tuohy questions her own motives. The film resolves the crisis in a way that seems satisfactory to the viewers, and to the characters, without wholly answering the question about motives. In real life, whatever that is, motives are always tangled, never pure and simple. In The Blind Side, what matters from the film’s point of view is the way in which racial and economic divides are bridged through the kindness and love of one family for a young man in need. If every wealthy family behaved like the Touhys, many problems in our nation might be solved, though we’d have a less diverse, more homogeneous nation as a result. And here we have another film suggesting that the way to success for a disadvantaged, minority character is through sports. The fact is that most families do not behave like the Tuohys, or cannot afford to, so what The Blind Side gives us is an isolated incident rather than a program for change. It makes us feel good without asking us to question how we live our lives.

[Old Smiley’s note:  A recent Slate article argues that the befriending of black athletes by white families is not as unusual as I’ve suggested.  See http://www.slate.com/id/2270482/.]

I’d Climb the Highest Mountain

I’d Climb the Highest Mountain (dir. Henry King, 1951) is a small and pious film. Nether adjective is meant to slight. Although one can always find reason to question the motives behind why a film of this type is made, the product itself is earnest enough. Based on a novel by the Georgia writer Corra Harris, the film chronicles the experience of Mary Elizabeth (Susan Hayward), a young woman who comes South to marry minister William Thompson (William Lundigan), assigned to a church in the North Georgia mountains. The house they move to is so isolated that the nearest neighbor is five miles away. The film was made largely where it was set, and numerous scenes show authentic mountain people (the film used numerous people from the region as extras) going about their daily business. Their faces are drawn and often haggard. Their children wear worn clothing and go bare footed (and often seem to have come straight out of Walker Evans photographs). They travel on horse and in buggies on washed out dirt roads. In many ways the use of setting and local inhabitants in the film is a major virtue. It rarely condescends. The only automobile in the area is driven by a rich woman from Atlanta who has a summer home in the mountains. She’s driven around by a chauffeur. The appearance of her car suggests that the film is set around 1920.

Through her own narration, we learn how Mary Elizabeth adjusts to marriage, to the rigors of life as a preacher’s wife, to the isolated mountains region where she lives. Most of all she has to adjust to her husband William. He has a lot of modern views, has a couple of wild streaks, rarely loses his temper, but is stubborn. He’s not afraid to argue with unbelievers or with the richest man in town, who makes donations to the church. (On occasion his virtuousness seems difficult to bear, even for his wife). As modern as William might be, she is even more so. When a local young man (Rory Calhoun) widely regarded as a ne’er-do-well falls in love with the daughter of the wealthiest man in town, both she and her husband take his side. In one prolonged episode, an unspecified pestilence strikes the area, and Mary Elizabeth and William assist the local medical doctor in caring for the ill.

In a certain way the film dramatizes an ongoing conflict between faith and reason, belief and disbelief. A Harvard-educated man and his family live nearby. He has taught his children that religion is false and raises them in a firm and unyielding way. He and William have several discussions about reason and faith. As the pestilence wears on, the local doctor questions why God would inflict such suffering. Even Mary Elizabeth seems to have doubts. William is an unwavering believer. He’s never swayed by arguments against the existence of God, by the pestilence, by personal tragedies. Gradually his piety wins over his wife, and gradually her willingness to break with traditions and even to break some rules in service of a good cause wins him over too.

There’s only a tenuous relationship between the film’s title and its subject. In addition to the title’s being a vague expression of religious faith, it also implies all the challenges Mary Elizabeth must face as she learns to live with her husband. In the end, she explains to him that she’s realized her destiny is to be a minister’s wife, to go with him wherever his calling takes him, quoting from the Book of Ruth, “Whither thou go’est, I will go, and whither thou lodge, I will lodge,” and so on.

This brings us to some of the more archaic aspects of this film. Shortly after the death of a neighborhood boy by drowning, Mary Elizabeth goes into labor and delivers a stillborn son. She is, understandably, grief stricken. She rouses from unconsciousness to insist that her husband baptize the child because she doesn’t want to believe he isn’t alive somewhere. For months she says she is in mourning, hardly aware of where she is. She then says that she commits “the gravest sin a woman can commit against her husband: I ceased to care how I looked.” Only the visit of a wealthy woman from Atlanta, who says she wants William to explain “some Biblical questions,” brings her out of her stupor. As Mary puts it, she was “rudely awakened” by the sight of this woman. After the second visit, Mary warns the Atlanta woman to go back to her own husband and to leave William alone. She goes to the local store and buys expensive fabric to make a dress that will win William’s notice. Later she confesses to him that this wasteful act inspired all the women in the church to spend money on expensive fabric rather than donate to the local mission. So it takes jealousy, envy, and self-indulgence to rescue this woman from grief—no spiritual or emotional or philosophical coming to terms with tragedy, not the passage of time, but jealousy, and at the cost of the local mission to boot!

The poorly hidden subtexts of this film (reinforced by the quotation from Ruth above) are that woman is shallow and fickle and that marriage is a sacred institution to be revered above all others, and that a woman must accept her subordinate place within it—to follow her husband’s will, to play a subservient role. Although we are told that William’s stubbornness is a weakness he must struggle to overcome, it is Mary who does most of the struggling. Her litany of mistakes and small sins are all what we would expect from a female character in a 1950s melodrama or comedy about marriage—a woman who does not closely cleave to her expected role as wife (and, in this case, minister’s wife)—must be brought back into the fold. Mary Elizabeth is a North Georgia version of Lucy Ricardo, always getting into trouble, always in need of gentle correction. Her husband is invariably smarter and more perceptive than she—when she confesses (on several occasions) that she has lied to him, he tells her that he knew she had lied all along—all of this in the lightest and most flirtatious of marital banter.

One wonders about the domestic life of the screenwriter, Lamar Trotti, an Atlanta native. Was he trying to deliver a message to someone at home? Or was he just speaking for the culture at large? In 1951 marriage was a revered institution, a pillar of the social structure, and this film, through frequent demonstrations of piety and good heartedness, makes the dramatic moment for Mary Elizabeth not her recognition of the value and goodness of the community where she has come to live but instead her willing and happy acceptance of her role as obedient wife of the church minister.

The Circuit Rider’s Wife (1910) by Corra Harris is often described as semi-autobiographical, but it doesn’t reveal the less-than-satisfactory nature of her marriage to her own husband, a philandering and alcoholic Methodist minister whose adultery cost him his position and led to his ultimate suicide, and to her public shame and humiliation. The marriage of William and Mary Elizabeth is sometimes faced with minor challenges, but not of the sort Harris faced in her own life.