Part football movie and part “Precious” with a happy ending, John Lee Hancock’s “The Blind Side” is a heart-tugger that once again proves that sometimes truth (more or less) is stranger than reality.
Although still sporting the same blond wig, Sandra Bullock redeems herself after the dreadful “All About Steve” by beautifully playing Leigh Anne Tuohy, a Steel Magnolia in Memphis who takes a troubled black teenager named Michael Oher into her very white family’s McMansion.
“Who ever thought,” Leigh Anne’s husband Sean (country singer Tim McGraw, very good) remarks later on the couple’s prejudices, “we would have a black son before we knew a Democrat?”
There aren’t that many one-liners in “The Blind Side,” which is basically a true rarity: a fish-out-of-water drama about race relations centering on Michael, who, like the heroine of “Precious,” is large, African-American, abused and functionally illiterate — but no dummy.
Michael is on the verge of flunking out of a lily-white Christian academy when Leigh Anne — seeing him running around in shorts and a T-shirt during the dead of winter — decides to make him an improbable member of her family.
The Tuohy’s young son (Jae Head) is on board with the idea, although his older sister (Lily Collins) resists at first. The reaction from Leigh Anne’s friends is more pointed.
“Is this a white guilt thing?” one pal asks her. In fact, the well-to-do Tuohys, who describe themselves as rednecks, are no liberals — but they take Christian principles seriously.
They do meet that Democrat, a liberal tutor (Kathy Bates’ most effective work in years) hired to help Michael improve his grades enough that he can try out for the school’s football team.
You can guess the rest, even if you didn’t know that in real life, Michael Oher became a star for the University of Mississippi (the Tuohys’ alma mater) and was drafted by the NFL’s Baltimore Ravens this year.
What makes “The Blind Side” a Thanksgiving treat is director Hancock’s subtle touch and admirable refusal to yield to sports movie clichés, something he did previously with “The Rookie” and “Remember the Titans.”
Quinton Aaron portrays Michael (who has very few lines of dialogue) with enormous expressiveness. And Adriane Lenox conveys a lifetime of pain in her two brief but exquisitely handled scenes as Michael’s crack-addicted mother.