Word: michael
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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That's how alien Michael (Quinton Aaron) appears to most of the students and faculty at Wingate Christian School. The abandoned son of a crack-addict mom (his father vanished and was murdered years later), he's the kind of kid for whom a written test looks like a scrawl in hieroglyphics, as foreign to him as a quick pass to the wideout might be to a more studious child. It asks him to strain muscles he has never been encouraged to use. His teachers dismiss him as stupid, illiterate, unteachable; his classmates shy away from him; and the ladies...
What Leigh Anne sees in Michael is a gentle stillness - he's like a Buddha statue transplanted to Tennessee - and she has just the energy to push this soft boulder up the hill of achievement. Checking his school records, she sees he got a 98 in "protective instincts." Why not have him protect the quarterback on the school's lackluster football team? If he turns out to be good at it, maybe he'll go to Ole Miss. She invites him to move into Casa Tuohy, assigns her mouthy son S.J. (Jae Head) to monitor Michael's exercise regimen, hires...
...Michael's enablers are white folks. Here are the film's main black characters: his crack-addicted mother (Adriane Lenox, who's very good, considering what she's got to work with); a drug lord and his posse who try to derail Michael from his destiny; and a buppie lawyer from the NCAA who investigates a charge that the Tuohys have unfairly steered Michael, who's finally a much-recruited high school star, into the Ole Miss football program. These characters are either lost, evil or suspicious. It's as if blackness were a plague and adoption by whites...
Reviewing the movie for Slant, Aaron Cutler goes further: "The ultimate NFL destination renders the whole thing benevolently sadistic: A white community first removes Michael from other black people, then trains him to beat them up on the field." Well, The Blind Side isn't exactly Gladiator. Oher is being paid well to do what hundreds of thousands of young men dream of. And if he had been left on the streets of Memphis, he might be dead now. But for all the closeups of black-white handshakes, the movie does have a Manichean view of the racial divide...
There are similarities between The Blind Side and Precious, the hit indie film about a pregnant, illiterate teenage girl whose teacher goads her toward self-worth. Both Michael and Precious begin as scholastic failures with awful moms and no hope who are reclaimed and saved by a caring adult woman. Except that, here, we see the awkward teen through the eyes of his white benefactor. Leigh Anne's first visit to Michael's old neighborhood is treated like Margaret Mead landing on Samoa. She delivers tough love to Michael's mother and tough lip to the local drug lords...