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Movie:		5.0
Picture:		6.0
Sound:		7.0
Extras:		6.0
Score:		5.0

Director(s):	Fernando Meirelles
Writer(s):	Jose Saramago (novel), Don McKellar (screenplay)
Starring:	Alice Braga • Danny Glover • Gael Garcia Bernal • Julianne Moore • Mark Ruffalo
Genre:	Drama
Website:	http://www.blindness-themovie.com/
Release Date:	February 10, 2009
Rated:

List Price:	DVD - $29.99
Amazon:

The premise of Blindness is an intriguing one: an epidemic of white blindness strikes humanity, infecting almost everyone in the world over a short period of time. Soon enough, no one can see, save for a woman known to us only as the Doctor’s Wife (Julianne Moore.) When the blind are quarantined, packed into cells like zoo animals, she feigns blindness in order to stay close to her husband, and the story progresses from there. Predictably enough, the microcosmic society rapidly devolves into a deranged orgy of depravity, standing in for the rest of the world, which is likely suffering the same fate.

The film is based on Jose Saramago’s Nobel Prize-winning novel of the same name, and if you’ve read the book, the film will most definitely disappoint. Plot wise, it follows Saramago’s novel closely, almost to a fault, but it fails to resound with the poignancy of the actual text. The problem is that the medium of literature allows a lot more room for the revelation of the inner lives of its characters, gradually and delicately. This is possible to achieve in film as well, but it’s much more difficult, and it requires a whole lot more subtlety than Fernando Meirelles is apparently capable of.

For instance, in terms of aesthetic, Meirelles goes to great lengths to make sure we don’t forget that these people are suffering from white blindness. You got that? WHITE BLINDNESS. BLINDNESS THAT IS WHITE. But just in case you forget, Meirelles’s direction will hammer the point home. Non-stop, in fact. There’s the white fog. And the white cars. And the white clothes. And the blinding white lights. Basically, he uses every filmic technique you can think of to make sure the audience doesn’t forget that EVERYONE IS BLIND. Now, I’m all for telling a story visually, but here it just seems like overkill, not to mention a cop-out. It’s gimmicky and grating and inconsistent and downright annoying.

The worst part is that Meirelles has so much to work with. There is so much depth to the story, and so many different ways to examine how easily the mask of sanity and civility slips when faced with dire circumstances, how quickly we humans are wont to turn bestial and resort to our basest instincts to survive in a desperate situation. The acting is solid as well, which is no surprise with a cast that consists of Julianne Moore, Mark Ruffalo and Gael Garcia Bernal, all of whom are as talented as they are underrated.

Somehow Meirelles takes all of these advantages for granted. He just isn’t very adept at playing it coy. Case in point: a scene towards the end of the film depicts a pack of stray dogs hungrily tearing away at a dead man’s rotting flesh. Get it? The dogs are, like, totally a metaphor for a society reacting to peril! Just like the kind the characters are facing! Clever, right? Well, it would be, if the direction didn’t completely beat you over the head with the scene’s implication. The camera lingers on the shot of the dogs, cuts to Moore’s horrified face, then cuts back to the dogs again. It’s not just irritating; it’s an insult to the audience’s intelligence. Besides this minor yet bothersome detail, entire parts of the film just feel careless. For instance, how exactly did the King of Ward III’s (Bernal) gang manage to get their hands on the weapons needed to take over the holding cells? It’s a pretty major detail to gloss over, yet Meirelles does just that, without so much as a line of expository dialogue to quell any confusion.

That said, the film isn’t all bad. The scenes depicting the moral, physical and psychological breakdowns of the quarantined prisoners are terrifyingly realistic, and there is a group rape scene that is absolutely harrowing in that in leaves most of the atrocity to the imagination. There are beautiful moments here as well, such as when the Man with the Black Eye Patch (Danny Glover) speaks to the Woman with the Dark Glasses (Alice Braga), with whom he is falling in love, saying “I know the part inside you with no name. And that’s who we are, right?” It’s a moving sentiment, if a little hackneyed, but it expresses what is truly at the heart of the story: who we really are is only revealed when we have absolutely nothing left to lose. And yet, in the film, the line is treated as little more than a piece of throwaway dialogue. If Meirelles focused more on giving us truthful little gems like this and less on how to get the lens flares on his camera just right, Blindness wouldn’t be quite so forgettable.

DVD Bonus Features

The DVD features “A Vision of Blindness,” a documentary on the making of the film, from securing the rights to the book to training the actors to the director’s changing vision of the film. It’s an enjoyable watch, but it doesn’t really say anything that you can’t infer from the film itself. There are also a few deleted scenes, but let’s just say they were deleted for a reason.