The Blind Side

John Lee Hancock’s film keeps the person from Michael Lewis’s book and drops its argument. Lewis wrote about how Lawrence Taylor’s arrival in 1981 reshaped the outside linebacker role, made large and agile left tackles valuable, and pushed their pay above every other position. On screen that economics is gone and the family is everything. The emotional engine sits exactly where Oher objects. Leigh Anne explaining the left tackle’s job as protecting the family is the scene he rejected in his 2012 memoir, writing that he had studied the game since childhood and that the film made him look stupid rather than untaught. Sandra Bullock refused the part three times, uneasy about playing a devout woman, accepted after meeting Leigh Anne Tuohy, and cut her fee for a share of the gross on a film that cost 29 million dollars. In 2023 Oher argued the document he thought was an adoption was a conservatorship. Judge Kathleen Gomes ended it, saying she had never in forty three years seen such an arrangement for someone not disabled. Sean Tuohy answered that each share of the film money came to about fourteen thousand dollars. A good fit if you want the film and the court fight over it in one sitting. Not for a reader chasing the book’s left tackle economics.