From Page to Screen: 'The Blind Side'
Filed under: Drama, Sports, New Releases, From Page to Screen
One thing you hear a lot about the great HBO series The Wire is some variation on "it ruined all other cop shows for me." And it's true. The Wire was so smart about policework, so painfully realistic without sacrificing drama, that it made damn near everything else, with the obligatory gun-and-badge-scene clichés and pat little whodunnits, seem downright silly; ridiculous. Creators and writers David Simon and Ed Burns called the bluff of an entire genre. They stripped away the Hollywood varnish and made their peers look goofy, clueless, like so many deer staring at headlights.
Michael Lewis's The Blind Side isn't quite like that, but it's close. Certainly I will henceforth have trouble restraining gales of laughter at the naiveté of football movies about scrappy underdog quarterbacks who overcome the odds and lead their teams to victory. Or about the glory of college football. Or about players who make it to the NFL through sheer pluck and determination.
Even more so than The Wire to lame cop dramas, The Blind Side is an explicit rebuke to such stories. Straight up, Lewis (who also wrote Moneyball) says: it doesn't work that way. First of all, the quarterback isn't even that important. A coach with a handle on strategy and talent elsewhere on the roster, can, within reason, make damn near anyone look good throwing the ball. Second: who makes it to the NFL is determined, 99% of the time, not by persistence and heart, but by genetics. Size. Much more than you might think, shape. Innate athleticism that cannot be taught or learned. Depressingly, the selection process for great football prospects often resembles a state fair where people admire the girth and gait of cattle and "hmm" and point thoughtfully.
Third: the road from high school ball to college ball to "the league" is a combination of farce, madness and travesty. Word about great high school prospects – kids deemed to be big enough, wide enough, fast enough – spreads like wildfire. Coaches flock to the high schools these players call home, but NCAA rules prohibit them from actually speaking to the players until a certain point in their senior year, so they just stand there and watch and drop hints. Then the coaches pull out all the stops to convince the players to sign with their respective schools – schools that, by the way, wouldn't even consider these poor, academically inept, occasionally illiterate kids if they did not carry with them the promise of lucrative football championships.
And it's not like this process regularly leads to poor inner-city kids getting opportunities they otherwise would not have had. Sure, sometimes it works out that way. But since only a small minority of college football players is likely to hit the big time, the system usually chews up and spits out the rest. These are "students" in name only, existing in a sort of academic ghetto. The school cares not about their success but their NCAA eligibility. Graduation rates mostly hover between 50 and 60%. When it becomes clear that the NFL is not in the cards, many players just quit and go back from whence they came.
If this seems like heady material for a Sandra Bullock movie, rest assured that The Blind Side does have a good old-fashioned underdog story – of a sort – at its center. It's the story of Michael Oher, who was drafted by the Baltimore Ravens this year from the University of Mississippi (Ole Miss). Oher was a destitute, essentially illiterate – but enormous – kid from inner-city Memphis who set off one of the biggest recruiting frenzies in football history without really even setting foot on a football field. Good-hearted and fiercely protective of people who show him kindness, Oher wound up at an upscale Christian school and was adopted by a wealthy white family with Ole Miss connections (this is where Bullock comes in). Thanks to his extraordinary physical gifts, he went from having literally nothing and no one to having a genuinely loving family and the prospect of an epic NFL career at left tackle – one of the most prized and well-compensated positions in modern football, charged with protecting the right-handed quarterback's blind side.
This is stirring stuff, but Lewis filters it through the whip-smart, somewhat jaundiced perspective I describe above. My worry, of course, is that the movie – directed by John Lee Hancock (The Rookie) – will make this into a generic story of overcoming the odds. (This is not promising.) Don't be fooled. The message of The Blind Side isn't that even a poor black kid from Memphis can achieve his dreams with persistence and determination. Rather, it's that at the critical time, the market greatly valued what Michael Oher could provide. And what the market wants, the market gets.
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
9-01-2009 @ 4:16PM
Jerald Brewer said...
"The Blind Side" is 1 of the best non-fiction books I've ever read (I think it much better than Lewis's more famous "Moneyball") so I too share your concerns about the movie. I hope it isn't turned into "Remember The Titan" (BTW I loved the Denzel starrer with the added "s").
The trailer looks promising, but I'm still holding my breath on a movie I can't wait to see. If their is any hope here, I thought for sure "The Time Traveler's Wife" would be ruined on screen & it is 1 of my 3 favorite films of the year (insert yet another plug for "The Hurt Locker").
And remember "Bull Durham", "Eight Men Out", "Hoosiers" & "North Dallas Forty" (to name a few like "For Love Of The Game") as sports movies that go long & hit it out of the park.
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9-01-2009 @ 12:37AM
cablebfg said...
I will have to look into this book. And The Wire. Thanks for the awesome descriptions.
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9-01-2009 @ 1:50AM
Riley Freeman said...
i mentioned this in the comments when i was saying im more excited to see this than avatar.
It looks like a good movie. its about time sandra got away from all of her goofy roles. im interested in seeing it
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9-01-2009 @ 11:19AM
gwydion said...
You don't much about high school recruiting if you think coaches don't talk to kids until sometime in their senior year. In fact, I'd say you don't know much about football period.
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9-16-2009 @ 1:30PM
john said...
THIS STORY IS FULL OF %$@%!!
I played against Michael Oher in football and had many friends that went to school with him. Even though this story sounds very inspiring from an outsiders perspective, I can assure everyone that this movie does not depict the true story of Michael Oher. Lets start by examining the family that adopted Big Mike, the Toughy's. It is a known fact that this family has been labeled as self-righteouss, fame-seeking, and conceited by many reputable families from the shelby county area. In fact the board of directors at Briarcrest, where big mike went to school(who refused the rights to the schools name for production of the movie because of a bogus storyline), asked the toughy's to leave the school because of other forms of misconduct involving the recruitment of other athletes for the high school. The idea that Mrs. Toughy was the one that found big mike on the side of the road is complete nonsense. Big mike was moved from family to family within the community of Briarcrest a whole year before the Toughy's even knew about him. As for this B.S. about accusations of racism within the school toward big mike, its ideas like this that keep racism a steady point of conflict within society. Big mike was never discriminated against throughout his entirety of what some think was schooling at Briarcrest. This brings me to another point, how the hell could an illiterate kid off the streets excel in a prominent private school. I have many friends that on more than one occasion expressed to me the lack of fairness concerning the classroom and big mike. Such as: "I sat next to big mike in class and every time we had an assignment, he would be graded at a low F, and when his final grade for the class came back it was B." One student who was in his class even said he didnt think he could read, in the 9th grade! Not to mention that big mike's play on the field resembled that of a thug. In the state championship game he grabbed one of my friend's testicles so hard that he had to sit out that series. He showed no class when he won, throwing his helmet 60 feet in the air amidst oppossing players. So now thats just one more glorified illiterate thug in the NFL that makes millions just for being big, just think there are going to be so many kids that look up to him and want to be like him, and he just sucks as a person. You know it would be ok if he could just do what he does, I dont even care if he makes a good living thats fine, but do we honestly have to praise the guy. I mean make a movie out of him.... c'mon thats ridiculous. Anybody who was as big as he was could do what he did, with much more class. Lets praise the guys that deserve it, like: tim tebow, hines ward, reggie white, or pat tillman.
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10-06-2009 @ 2:04PM
darci said...
I read parts of this book (the ones about Oher, not all the technical football stuff) and absolutely loved it. I really hope that this movie stays true to the original story, because this is one true story that needs no Hollywood embellishments to bring tears to even the most uptight person. Nobody could have written a fantasy story this life-affirming.
I've been waiting for this movie for awhile, but only just now saw the trailer and that is getting me even more excited. I also thought it was cool that they used a snippet of the song "Kill the Messenger" by Jack's Mannequin in the 2nd trailer (about 45 seconds in), because the singer also has an inspirational personal story as a cancer survivor...hope to hear more Jack's Mannequin music in the movie.
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