Blindness
Review by Carolyn Arends | posted 10/03/2008
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In Blindness, the bleak new film from acclaimed director Fernando Meirelles (City of Men, The Constant Gardener), a major city is struck with an epidemic of "The White Sickness," a highly contagious disease that causes sudden loss of vision. Health officials react swiftly; within hours, hazmat-suited military personnel are quarantining infected individuals in a dilapidated sanitarium.
The afflicted are abandoned to cope with their blindness in utterly foreign, unsanitary surroundings. Conditions worsen, supplies dwindle, and violence escalates. Only one person is an eyewitness to the chaos—the wife (Julianne Moore) of an ophthalmologist (Mark Ruffalo) who has faked her own blindness in order to stay with (and help) her afflicted husband.
Mark Ruffalo and Julianne Moore as husband and wife
Blindness is based on a disturbing and promising premise, one that allows the filmmakers to comment on the response of authorities to crisis (think Hurricane Katrina) and ask important questions about the resiliency of social structures. What crimes will humans commit if no one can see them? What conventions of civility will dissolve in the absence of extrinsic authority? How quickly does the instinct for self-preservation obliterate more altruistic tendencies? And how blind are we to injustices going on all around us?
Unfortunately, Meirelles and screenwriter Don McKellar are in such a rush to explore these Big Picture questions that they overlook important details like plot and character development. The result is a stylistically and thematically self-conscious film that shows flashes of brilliance, but ultimately fails (quite spectacularly) to live up to its obvious promise.
Gael Garca Bernal as Bartender
Blindness is based on the celebrated novel by Nobel Prize-winning author José Saramago. According to enthusiastic reviewers, the book offers a richly nuanced description of the gradual breakdown of civility among the makeshift "Society of the Blind." But in the film, this descent into chaos is depicted in a too-rapid montage that has the patients behaving like ordinary citizens one minute and defecating in hallways the next.
Meirelles likely means to suggest that the disintegration takes place over time, but the editing is confusing. As the situation quickly worsens, the asylum looks more littered and chaotic in one shot and less in the next. A simple detail like the men's facial hair growth in the absence of razors could have helped establish lapsed time, but the characters (including Ruffalo's doctor in particular) are erratically bearded.
In defense of the filmmakers, much of the confusion is no doubt intentional. Novelist Saramago never names the city or even the people in his story (referring to his protagonists as "The Doctor," "The Doctor's Wife," and "The Woman in the Dark Glasses"), choosing instead to let the reader, like his blind characters, be in the dark about certain details. Saramago even eschews traditional punctuation, evidently in order to keep the reader in a disoriented state appropriate to the story.
Danny Glover as the Man with the Black Eye Patch
Meirelles seems to be aiming for the cinematic equivalent of Saramago's literary approach, leaving many aspects of the story ambiguous and dissolving numerous scenes into light at critical moments. In the opening scenes, a patient describes the world he sees (or can't see) as "swimming in milk," and the director floods much of the film in hyper-saturated whites from that point on. (Even Julianne Moore's normally red mane is a washy blonde throughout the film.)
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