Sandra Bullock is sharp, quick and funny as the Memphis mother who takes a homeless teenager into her house, and John Lee Hancock’s film is so grateful to her that it forgets to be curious about him. Pleasant, well made and thin.
John Lee Hancock writes and directs a 129-minute film about Michael Oher (Quinton Aaron), a homeless teenager from the Memphis projects who is taken in by a wealthy white family and turns out to be good at football. It is a warm, uncomplicated account of a good deed, told from the side of the people who did it, and on those terms it succeeds. Whether they are the right terms, it never asks.
Sandra Bullock is the reason it holds together. Daniel Orlandi puts Leigh Anne Tuohy in white jeans, fitted blazers and sunglasses pushed up into blow-dried hair, and Bullock walks into every room as if she owns the lease. She plays her without asking us to like her, which is why we do; the scene where she marches onto the practice field and reorganises the offensive line in front of Coach Cotton (Ray McKinnon) is properly funny. Tim McGraw plays Sean as a man who gave up winning arguments years ago. Jae Head’s small S.J. is the comic relief, and there is more of it than we wanted.
We were moved, more than the film’s manner led us to expect, by the scene that starts it all. Leigh Anne spots Michael on a dark November road in a T-shirt and shorts and asks where he is going. He says the gym, because it is warm. Aaron plays it without a plea in it; he simply answers the question. The next morning she comes downstairs to find the borrowed bedding folded on the couch and the boy gone. It is the film’s best minute, with almost no dialogue and no music.
After that morning the film loses interest in what Michael thinks. Hancock’s script gives him perhaps a dozen lines of any length. His past arrives through a caseworker’s file and one visit to his mother Denise (Adriane Lenox), devastating in her one scene. He is fed, dressed, tutored by Kathy Bates’s Miss Sue, coached, driven about and talked about, and the camera keeps returning to the people doing it. When he finally plays well, it is because Leigh Anne has walked onto the field and told him to think of the team as his family. We were cross about that, because Aaron is plainly capable of carrying a scene on his own and is almost never asked to.
The craft is polished, and it does the film’s thinking for it. Alar Kivilo shoots the Tuohy house in soft golden light, all cream walls and tall glass, and Michael Corenblith designs it as a showroom. Hurt Village is shot cooler and greyer, with a handheld wobble, so that the moral geography is settled before anyone speaks. Carter Burwell’s score stays unusually mild. Mark Livolsi’s cutting of the football is the real skill on show: the film opens with Leigh Anne explaining the left tackle’s job over slowed footage, and every later play is built so a newcomer can see the block land.
Hancock’s The Rookie, from 2002, was also a true sports story about an unlikely body arriving late to a game, and it trusted the sport more than this does. Here the sport is a route to a family portrait, better dressed and better acted than most of its kind. The reviews split three ways, and we sit with the mixed group: too well made to dismiss, too incurious to recommend.
See it if Bullock in full sail is the evening you want; she is on screen for most of the 129 minutes and wastes none of them. It carries a 12 certificate and will not trouble anyone. At home it settles into a comfortable Sunday piece with a large young man at its centre whom it never quite gets round to asking anything.
