In the land of the blind

Blindness
Review by Nathan Weinbender

What exactly is the point of “Blindness?” I am at a loss for an explanation. It purports to be a number of things, but it is dreadfully obvious as an allegory, turgid as a melodrama and nearly comatose as a thriller.

The film, based on a novel by Nobel laureate José Saramago, is one of ambiguity. It is set in a city that, as far as we know, has no name. None of its main characters are ever addressed by their names, either. It concerns an epidemic of blindness that has no known origin.

What is the cause of the disease? How does it spread? Is there a cure? Why does one woman seem to be completely immune? We don’t know.

The unaffected woman is played by Julianne Moore, the wife of an optometrist (Mark Ruffalo). When the victims of blindness are rounded up and imprisoned in an abandoned mental institution, Moore hides the fact that she can see.

As more and more people are crowded into the hospital, they quickly resort to “Lord of the Flies”-style barbarism, with one of the wards taking over and becoming the Jacks, while the other, more pacifistic wards become the Ralphs.

One man, the self-proclaimed King of Ward 3 (Gael García Bernal), finds a gun and sanctions the food rations. He demands the other wards hand over their valuables—jewelry, watches, money—in exchange for rations, and once those have run out, he demands women, which inspires the movie’s most unpleasant sequence.

Actually, all of “Blindness” is unpleasant, but it doesn’t have the decency to also be thought-provoking. Its conceits are pretty obvious, as are the routes its story takes, covering the same foreboding ground as every apocalyptic parable since Piggy picked up a conch shell.

This is the third major film from director Fernando Meirelles, whose previous works were the masterpieces “City of God” and “The Constant Gardener.” He uses an interesting aesthetic here—the camerawork is a little off-kilter, the picture is sometimes unintelligible, actors are awkwardly framed, and we sometimes feel as though we’re going a little blind ourselves.

But Meierelles’ ability to create memorable images only emphasizes how weak the story is. It simply isn’t compelling, mostly because it’s so damn impenetrable, and predictable, too. It puts its characters (and the audience) through hell, and it turns out to be little more than the cinematic equivalent of a dog chasing its own tail.

Grade: C-

Directed by Fernando Meirelles. Written by Don McKellar. Based on the novel by José Saramago. Starring Julianne Moore, Mark Ruffalo, Gael García Bernal, Alice Braga, Danny Glover and Yusuke Iseya. R; 120m.