'Blindness' is not Fernando Meirelles' best work

By Joey Vergara

Published Oct. 10, 2008

 When the scariest part of a survival-thriller like "Blindness" isn't the worldwide epidemic, but an ancient Danny Glover agreeing to undress before a group of survivors, something is wrong. Even blind, that's a gruesome sight to behold.

"Blindness" lies somewhere between a strangely neurotic "Children of Men" and an even grimmer "28 Days Later." If any message is to be found within, it's impossible to find underneath the film's intensity and cinematic sleight-of-hand.

The film, based on a novel by Portuguese author Jose Saramago, begins with a man suddenly going blind. Through his contact, the sickness quickly spreads through an unnamed city. Those affected are soon quarantined and must face the nature of their humanity as one hospital ward, led by Gael Garcia Bernal at his most vicious, takes over the food rationing. Julianne Moore, with a shockingly blanched face, plays the "Doctor's Wife" who is unexplainably immune to the disease and fakes her way into the containment zone.

"Blindness" demands a lot from the audience and ultimately delivers very little. Director Fernando Meirelles clearly struggled with adapting a novel about blindness to the cinema. Nothing - characters' names and motivations, the origin of the disease - becomes clear by the end of the film, and the audience is left in a lurch. It'd be enough to stomach all the poor acting and the absurd situations if there were any meaning in the chaos.

For all of this, Meirelles doesn't seem to understand his medium. Glover's "Man with the Eyepatch" appears out of nowhere, on a toilet no less, with a radio to explain away the government's response to the infection. Time constricts and races away without notice, leaving no markings but Mark Ruffalo's scraggly beard.

In order to convey the onset of blindness and ensuing confusion, scenes melt into blinding white or fuzzy cornered shots of coffee mugs. Whereas Julian Schnabel's "The Diving Bell and the Butterfly" beautifully imagined Elle editor Jean-Dominique Bauby's debilitating stroke and paralysis, Meirelles takes a blunter tool to his film. The camera techniques in "Blindness" don't capture the confusion of blindness but instead disorient the viewer and seem more parody than art.

The most intense scene of the movie, and possibly one of the worst in history, finds the women in Moore's Ward One volunteering their bodies to the men of Ward Three in exchange for food. It's a horrific situation in which the dignity of all parties involved is tested. The men of Ward One abandon the women, who are driven to such a state by starvation. Finally, the audience is unable to react properly to such a bizarre development and left dazed by its grotesqueness.

Although blind advocacy groups have said the film is offensive, the true crime is how underwhelming "Blindness" actually is. The newly-blind in the film are obviously disoriented and struggle with their survival because of it. It's an awful attempt at allegory but certainly not a jab at the blind.

It'd be too easy to suggest the heavy-handed "Blindness" is bad enough to leave you wanting blindness. More than anything it leaves you with a terrible taste in your mouth and struggling to make sense of the unexplained.