Film Review: 'Blindness' offers a bleak vision of a sightless, scary future
It sounds weird to say so, but I have what might be called an affection for movies about natural disasters, the collapse of civilization and the end of the world as we know it. There's something perversely thrilling about these ritualistic rehearsals of doom and their embrace of annihilation as entertainment.
Julianne Moore plays the still sighted wife of blinded Mark Ruffalo in "Blindness."Ken WoronerMiramax Films
Rated R for violence including sexual assaults, language and sexuality/nudity
Length: 118 minutes
Released: October 3, 2008 NationwideScore: 2.0
Cast: Mark Ruffalo, Julianne Moore, Sandra Oh, Gael García Bernal, Danny Glover
Director: Fernando MeirellesProducer: Niv Fichman, Andrea Barata Ribeiro, Sonoko Sakai
Writer: José Saramago, Don McKellar
Genre: Drama, Suspense/Thriller
Distributor: Miramax
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The latest of these, "Blindness," has earned mostly negative notices since its debut in May at the Cannes Film Festival. Many reviewers have objected to the movie's undeniable pretentiousness -- its somewhat unsubtle use of symbolism and "Lord of the Flies"-type allegory. But did anyone really expect a film adapted from a novel by Portuguese Nobel Prize laureate José Saramago to be as dynamic and economical as "Dawn of the Dead"?
"Blindness" -- the very title suggests a story with layers of meaning -- chronicles the disastrous aftermath of a world hit by an epidemic known as "the White Sickness" because victims are not blinded with darkness but with bright, milky light.
As the mysterious and apparently contagious disease spreads, martial law is declared and the infected are rounded up and quarantined in Gitmo-like prisons, where they are left to organize their own societies and create their own rules. (The blind are not segregated by sex, race or age, adding to the impression that we are watching an allegory about the "blindness" to injustice that generally afflicts the world at large.)
Conflict results when a villainous young man (Gael García Bernal) declares himself "the King of Ward Three." He and his thug supporters commandeer the weekly food supplies, demanding tribute -- first money and jewelry, and then sex -- from the residents of the other wards who want to eat.
Unknown to "the King" and most of the other quarantined blind people, however, the decent folk have a secret weapon: a woman (Julianne Moore) who is only pretending to be sightless so she can stay with her doctor husband (Mark Ruffalo), a gentle soul whose attempts to maintain civility and fairness in the wards meet with as much resentment as respect.
As a novel, "Blindness" obviously poses a problem for would-be adapters. It's one thing to describe the experiences of those who live without sight, it's another thing entirely to visualize such a world. How do you get a viewer to identify with characters whose point-of-view shots would be blank?
Brazilian director Fernando Meirelles doesn't really embrace this challenge. Working from a screenplay by Don McKellar, Meirelles invests the film with as much high style as he brought to his previous features, "The Constant Gardener" and "City of God." He can't show us much "blindness" if he wants us to follow the action, but he can leach the color from his shots, and present high-contrast images that are sometimes out of focus. Unfortunately, Meirelles employs this fashion-magazine esthetic from the start, so we don't share the shock of the characters when their vision fades -- it all looks the same to us.
Even so, "Blindness" is scary and gripping. It's especially striking when the movie simply imagines a world inherited by the suddenly blind, who grope their way through the increasingly trashy and disordered streets with all the incoherence of Romero's zombies.
-- John Beifuss, 529-2394
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