Blindness	by George Sax

Limited Vision

The opening scenes of Blindness are involving, even striking, and they seem to promise a film experience that’s engrossing, maybe even substantial.

“I am blind!” a man, apparently of Japanese birth, exclaims in fear in the film’s first dialogue. He’s sitting alone in his stopped car at a signal, and from among the gathering gawkers and the line of irate drivers behind the car, a man approaches, opens the door, tries to reassure the newly sightless driver, and offers to drive him home. Having done so, and after helping him inside his apartment, he steals the blinded man’s car. When the man’s wife returns, she takes him to an eye doctor (Mark Ruffalo), who admits he’s stymied and can only suggest hospital tests.

Meanwhile, director Fernando Meirelles gives us taut, tightly interwoven scenes of an exploding epidemic of sudden blindness. People literally stop in their tracks everywhere in a large, unidentified city at the immediate onset of a whited-out sightlessness. The authorities issue carefully framed, televised announcements, all delivered by the same even-toned anchorman, even while an urgently convened international conference breaks down as some participants are affected by this mysterious malady.

We’re only gradually aware that, superficial appearances notwithstanding, these events are occurring in a city that’s not in this country, and maybe not in any actual one. There’s a reference to the “Ministry of Health” for instance. All of these scenes are rendered in color-leached, nearly achromatic photography. Meirelles quickly and skillfully creates a growing sense of a softly Orwellian setting.

This becomes much more explicit when the doctor is himself stricken and his wife (Julianne Moore) calls for an ambulance. When she refuses to be separated from her husband, they’re both taken to an isolation facility and locked in a prison-like dormitory, where they’re soon joined by a number of others. The doctor and his wife remain the human center of the film. It’s also soon obvious that this is, in fact, a prison, with armed guards and no medical or social services. And Blindness’s potential impact quickly evaporates, as it becomes a turgidly belabored, muddled allegory of human lives in extremity and under intense threats. The film’s combination of banalities and overreach is overwhelming. (Who should wind up in the same ward but the Japanese guy, the doctor who first saw him and the punk who stole his car.)

The depiction of the vileness and brutal vicissitudes of life in this prison is put in service of a crudely fashioned narrative that moves uncertainly from what seem allusions to the HIV epidemic to intimations about the Holocaust and portrayals of vicious strife in Lord of the Flies territory. The whole thing is a lumbering, violence-laden vehicle.

Blindness certainly has an uncommonly distinguished origin; it’s adapted by Don McKellar from the novel of Portuguese Nobel Prize-winning novelist José Saramago. But what might well have been provocative and insightful on the page has been rendered portentously inflated.

The Brazilian Meirelles is a gifted director, but the style that was dynamically involving and excitement-charged a few years ago in City of God, had become too tricky and annoying in The Constant Gardener a couple of years later, and descends in this one to pretentious busyness. Meirelles has come up with some powerful, even riveting, scenes of disruption, panic and isolation, but they stand out in a welter of over determined and odd camera placements and movements. The results are sometimes nearly impenetrable visually, and produce narrative confusion. This may be intentional but the stylistic excesses ill serve the audience.

Blindness eventually subsides into a sort of bittersweet resolution that is probably intended to point to hope—there’s even a small boy and a friendly stray dog—but the note struck comes across as loftily empty.