Blindness comes with an established pedigree. Adapted from Portuguese Nobel Laureate José Saramago’s lauded book, the film is directed by Academy Award-nominee Fernando Meirelles (City of God) from a screenplay by Tony Award-winner Don McKellar (Broadway’s The Drowsy Chaperone) and stars Academy Award-nominee Julianne Moore. It would be easy to assume, given that sort of lineage, that Blindness would be a foregone masterpiece, rather than what it really is — one of the most unpleasant viewing experiences of my life.
In an unspecified city with a cosmopolitan, euro feel and a mishmash of accents and nationalities, a sudden plague of blindness begins sweeping through the population. It starts with a single driver who goes blind while sitting at a traffic light, is followed by the doctor (Mark Ruffalo) who later examines him, and so on until it seems that everyone in the city and perhaps even the world is incapacitated. Everyone that is, but the doctor’s wife (Julianne Moore).
As the infected are rounded up by the government and thrown into prison wards to isolate them from the rest of the population, the doctor’s wife pretends she also is inflicted so that she might remain with her husband. As the wards’ populations swell with the quarantined, things get increasingly brutal. Although the doctor tries in vain to maintain order, people soon begin living like animals. It isn’t long before the makeshift prison is awash in filth, human and otherwise.
Abandoned by their government, the ghettos fall into anarchy. As starvation takes hold, desperation and depravity set in. One monstrous inmate (Gael Garcia Bernal) confiscates what little food there is and doles it out in return for jewelry and sexual favors. A microcosm of civilized society, the afflicted are reduced to primeval lawlessness, animal appetites and shocking displays of violence, shedding any sense of self-respect, dignity or morality.
If the inmates thought their concentration camp was bad, the real horrors await them outside its walls. As the courageous doctor’s wife, both nurse and protector, leads a ragtag band of survivors through the streets of the city, they encounter barbarism on an unspeakable scale — thoroughfares glutted with the starving, dogs consuming decaying corpses. Even as a community of survivors form, it is hard to imagine how humanity will endure.
Blindness is torturous and profoundly boring (I must have consulted my watch a dozen times, desperate for it to be over). It is a grimy, ugly film, charged with an inexplicable cause, unredeemable despair and moments of unearned, deus ex machina hope.
The film is obviously an allegory, but its apocalyptic metaphors, like its plot, are never explained. The closest we come to enlightenment is presented as an off-the-cuff commentary but comes across like memorized narration. Is it government ineptitude? The dangers of the totalitarian state? The fragility of mankind? The disintegration of humanity in the face of the unknown?
Blindness is like a pretentious sociological experiment drawn on a massive scale. It is so preoccupied with its symbolism, that it utterly forgets to tell a compelling story much less follow the dictates of common sense. No one in Blindness acts believably. Once blinded, people suddenly forget to ask how or why. Worse, if Jullianne Moore can see, why does she keep it a secret? Why does she do nothing when she has the power, at least, to stop the human predators in their midst?
Blindness is stitched together with a soundtrack that could easily be mistaken for the sound of a symphony orchestra dragging its fingernails down dozens of chalkboards; a bleached, out of focus, overexposed cinematography; and writing so bad it’s hard to believe screenwriter McKellar is the same man responsible for the deliriously intoxicating Canadian television series, Slings and Arrows. Even M. Night Shyamalan is not this pretentious or obtuse.
You may never be so happy to leave a darkened theater and stagger into the light of the outside world as when Blindness’ credits finally, mercifully come to an end.
© Copyright 2008 Brandon Fibbs. All rights reserved.