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Inspired by Michael Lewis’ best-selling true story, The Blind Side is not the film one might expect judging solely from the marketing materials. Bearing the burden of being potentially culturally offensive and overly schmaltzy, The Blind Side instead threads an almost impossible needle, pulling off a surprisingly moving and inspirational story of compassion, self-discovery and hope.

Michael Oher (Quinton Aaron) has never slept in a real bed a single night in his life. Over-sized and under-educated, Michael is one of eight children, each of whom was fathered by a different man. His mother, a drug addict, drifts between Nashville streets and ramshackle low-income housing projects. It is only a matter of time before Michael is also hopelessly entrapped.

Fate intervenes when Michael’s uncle shows his nephew off to the football coach (Ray McKinnon) of a local, well-heeled private school. Though untested, the coach sees potential in Michael, if for no other reason than he would be the largest thing on two legs to step foot on the field. Though the school board is split on giving Michael a scholarship—after all, his grades are abysmal—Michael is admitted, the lone African American student in a sea of wealthy white faces. What school administrators do not know is the extent of Michael’s poverty—he has only two sets of clothes, the second set of which he carries around in a plastic grocery bag. He has begun secretly sleeping in the gymnasium, feeding himself on bags of popcorn left over from various sporting events.

Enter Leigh Anne Touhy (Sandra Bullock), a woman who would surely be a steel magnolia caricature were it not for the fact that we know she is based on fact. A no-nonsense personality, when Leigh Anne sets her sights on something, she is an unstoppable force of nature. So it is that when Leigh Anne discovers Michael’s predicament, she takes him into her house without a second’s hesitation. For Michael, who has known only the street, Leigh Anne’s palatial house, set amongst a neighborhood of white picket fences, white church steeples and white women jogging with $1,000 strollers, is like entering another country complete with a culture shock that he cannot intellectually or emotionally process. He can no sooner relate to a Norman Rockwell coffee table book than he can to a parchment in Sanskrit.

At first the placid, soft-spoken Michael is hard to read. “He’s like an onion,” her husband, Sean (Tim McGraw), tells her, “It takes time to peel back the layers to see what’s inside.” “Not if you use a knife” is her true-to-form retort. To his credit, Sean never questions his wife’s altruism. Nor do her children, vivacious young S.J. (the uproarious Jae Head) or teenaged Collins (Lily Collins). But just as S.J. and Collins are the object of much bewilderment and even scorn at school for their peculiar living arrangements, so too does Leigh Anne face puzzlement from her upper crust social circles, who have made a showy game of contributing to various causes, but have never actually gotten dirt beneath their manicured fingernails a day in their lives.

Though it takes some time to find his footing, Michael quickly begins to shine on the football field. So much so in fact that renowned agents and college coaches (playing themselves) are soon knocking down Michael’s door. But if Michael wants to go to college, his grades will require almost supernatural intervention. Leigh Anne hires a permanent, live-in tutor (Kathy Bates) to boost Michael’s grades. But just as it appears that Michael’s future is yawning open with possibility, his old life rears its ugly head and threatens to swallow him whole.

I confess I was prepared to dislike The Blind Side. The film had been the subject of much discussion between me and my dear friend, Tim Gordon, formerly the film critic for Black Entertainment Television. Tim dubbed The Blind Side a “Mighty Whitey” film: stories in which a white protagonist saves people of color without whose superior intervention they would surely have been lost. Examples range from epics like Lawrence of Arabia and The Last Samurai to classroom dramas like Dangerous Minds. The Blind Side seemed to take it one step further by introducing another dubious cinematic trope, “The Magic Negro,” an intentionally anachronistic term denoting a character of color who saves the story and the white protagonist specifically by means of some special insight or power (think The Green Mile or The Legend of Bagger Vance).

While not necessarily exempt because of it, the fact that a film is based on real events certainly complicates this dynamic. The truth is, The Blind Side never falls into the trap to which many other, lesser films succumb if for no other reason than it recognizes the undesirable possibility but respects its characters, including Michael, too much to become an unsavory cliché. Tim and I were pleasantly surprised to discover that, rather than ignore the potentially offensive material, the film deals with it head on. The whiteness and blackness of the characters is traded instead for a look at those things that lie beneath the skin. Leigh Anne is not driven by some sort of liberal guilt, but by a heart that is far softer than her exterior would suggest, one that breaks to see another person in pain. Period. Likewise, Michael is shown to be someone who is willing to sacrifice anything, including himself, to protect those he loves. In a truly colorblind society, these characters’ race would be irrelevant and we would focus instead on one human being unconditionally loving another human being.

This stance benefits the film in another way. While The Blind Side is the sort of story that traditionally degrades into cheap sentimentality, the film remains grounded, avoiding easy, emotional potshots. If it draws tears, it earns them. Much of this anti-maudlin mentality is a result of identifying with a mama bear too ornery to shed tears for just anything. When Leigh Anne is told she is changing Michael’s life and she replies, “No, he’s changing mine,” we don’t laugh at the sappiness of the line because it is delivered by someone in complete and utter earnest.

It is pretty clear that young Michael Oher never dreamed of the day he would be welcomed into a loving family or that he would be drafted 23rd overall by the Baltimore Ravens in the 1st Round of the 2009 NFL Draft. Nor, we’re sure, did a rich, Southern white woman ever dream of adopting a young black man twice her size. Life, The Blind Side says, is defined by our reactions to what we don’t see coming. While most films with an “out of the blue” thematic element focus on the apocalyptic trials that come out of nowhere to clobber us, it’s nice to see something that says that blessings can be every bit as sneaky and just as profound.

© Copyright 2009 Brandon Fibbs. All rights reserved.