THE BLIND SIDE – john lee hancock – 1.5 / 10

If anything about film can be said to be dangerous it’s that a movie can be simultaneously both horribly offensive and skillfully made. John Lee Hancock’s latest is a case in point. If you’re not paying all that much attention, The Blind Side seems like an enjoyable, if somewhat hackneyed and clichéd, crowd-pleaser. But if you look a little closer, it becomes clear just how horrifyingly racist the film is.

The danger, of course, is that it’s pretty easy not to look closer. It’s pretty easy to get caught up in the film’s story and ignore the fact that every black character in the film is either a drug addict, a sports star, a criminal or some combination of the three put in the film only as a means to motivate the white characters to grow and learn. But if you don’t notice that-- and given the film’s tremendous box office performance, it seems unlikely that many people are noticing-- there’s a very real danger of these horribly reductive stereotypes becoming ever more ingrained in our culture. Every time racism is allowed to go uncommented upon in a feel good crowd-pleaser like this one, every time audiences don’t stand up and walk out ten minutes into something this lopsidedly racist, the truly offensive ideas about race on display in The Blind Side become a little more accepted and a little more commonplace.

One film, of course, isn’t going to completely shape anyone’s worldview. But the danger of the type of racism on display here is that it’s insidious. It’s hidden in an ‘uplifting’ film that purports to be a true story. Because of that, the audience is more likely to believe that this is how these people are, that these stereotypes are the way it really was. Do that enough times, with enough films like this one or The Green Mile or Million Dollar Baby or The Legend of Bagger Vance and eventually the stereotypes start to stick. And that’s when film becomes truly dangerous. Overt racism is long dead and completely unacceptable in modern America. But the subtle racism of the sort on display in The Blind Side looks like it’s going to be with us for a while yet. And as long as people line up to buy tickets to this type of garbage, Hollywood will be all too happy to keep reinforcing these hateful ideas.