The Greatest Play

Nicely done, Sandra Bullock – with The Blind Side you’ve completed a late-in-the-game pass to movie audiences everywhere that should make us all but forget All About Steve and remember what great promise you pledged for 2009 with The Proposal.

There’s a good reason why Bullock’s been one of Hollywood’s MVPs for years, and that’s because, mostly, she knows how to give people what they want. Today’s based-on-an-incredible-true-story The Blind Side is just that, and perhaps her best shot at some top-shelf awards love as well.

At least at the Golden Globes.

The perfectly timed movie – Thanksgiving is just around the corner – features the actress as Leigh Anne Tuohy, the no-non-sense driving force behind a well-to-do Memphis, fast-food-restaurant-chain-owning family.

Yes, she’s beautifully blond, and salty and a total whip, but her shade of blond radiates from within with the light of her heart of gold, which at first glance is carefully protected by an impenetrable barrier of apparent hoity-toityness.

The day before Thanksgiving, Leigh Anne and her picture-perfect family – which includes her man-behind-the-woman-and-happy-to-be-there husband Sean (played by Tim McGraw), daughter Collins, and son SJ – are driving home from SJ’s Turkey Day school play when she spots, and at first dismisses, the boy everyone calls Big Mike (Quinton Aaron).

Big Mike is a gentle giant of a 17-year-old black kid from the wrong side of town, the product of a broken home and a school system keener in passing him along than in actually making an effort to teach him anything.

It’s raining and it’s cold, and he seems directionless, so Leigh Anne reconsiders – it’s like she’s fated to give him a second thought – and takes him home.

He ends up spending the holiday with the Tuohys, and pretty soon, he becomes one of them, a part of the family.

Taking a genuine interest in him in spite of her so-called friends’ snickering, Leigh Anne clothes and feeds him, and helps him realize and fulfill his potential – and she also starts calling him Michael (he hates being called Big Mike), thus empowering him to blossom, at first in the class room and in his relationships with others, and then as a star high school lineman.

The changes in Michael are reflected in the Tuohys’ lives. As Leigh Anne sees it, though, he’s the one who’s changing her and them, not the other way around.

Michael, as you may know, is a character inspired by Michael Oher, now a successful NFL player.

His story is nothing short of incredible, a total feel-good jolt of energy, a believe, as told in The Blind Side, that we can all add up to something tremendous with a helping hand.

Seen through cynical eyes, the movie’s a little too good to be true, a bit earnest, and quite disingenuous. But believing is what this season is all about, and I loved every bit of it – especially how much Bullock’s character reminded me of myself.

My Rating ***1/2

Photo: Warner Bros.