The Blind Side That Has A Blind Spot

The Blind Side is an inspiring sport drama with Sandra Bullock, who was perfectly casted for a WASP housewife, Mrs Tuohy, embracing a young African-American athlete, Big Mike. Other than that, it’s a perfect basis for an case study on the concept of biographical movies.

Although it seems to be the easiest job in the world, adapting a biographical book to screen is actually a tricky concept. “Art imitates life”, true that, but life itself doesn’t necessarily make up for a good movie. And that’s where the creators have to step in, and do either of two things (or both of them at the same time).

First of all, they have to “narrow down” the story, so that it takes the form of an easy-to-follow narrative with processable concepts, distilled (visual) language. Of course, for fiction, it’s sort of a given: stories are always created with some sort of narrative coherence in mind. Hovewer, life is much more complex than that. When it comes to making a biographical movie, creators have to omit certain subplots and characters, so that there’s a very basic, inherent emphasis in the biography. Michael Jordan, for example, is a hypercompetitive can-do fighter. John Nash is a peculiar scientist fighting schizophrenia. Just like Frida Kahlo, who is, again, a physically hindered artist with a spirit of a bird, always struggling with an inexplicable attraction to her unfaithful husband. Any subplots pointing in different directions must be eliminated; that’s the rule.

On the other hand, sometimes biographies needs a little push. That’s when screenwriters have to “add” to the story, so that a specific aspect of the story is underline. These additions often wreaks havoc online, as they can be interpreted as ignoring one of the most essential criteria of non-fiction, which is truthfulness. Obviously, stories fall far from the world of realism; they depict events from a limited number of select perspectives and are maintained by narrators and interpreters, therefore they can be, at most, construed as interpretations of reality.

The Blind Side is a shining example of a poorly designed biographical drama. Not only does it fail to construct a “readable” story of Michael Oher’s starting of his career, it’s also a trainwreck of a drama. With unbelievably flat characters, and especially stock characters (the cheerleader, the athlete etc.) in the house, it couldn’t have been more difficult to introduce conflict to the story, except for Big Mike’s (inner) conflict between the hood and the American Dream of WASP Land at the Tuohy’s.

There’s a dialogue in the movie that takes place between Big Mike and Mrs Tuohy, which illuminates the defects of the movie better than any words of mine. So here we go:

MRS TUOHY: I know I should have asked this a long time ago but do you even wanna play football? I mean, do you even like it?’

BIG MIKE: I’m pretty good at it.

MRS TUOHY: Yeah, you are.

And that is an awful drama that even Sandra Bullock, no matter how great an actress she is, can’t fix.