Movie Review

Blindness

What do you make of a movie about the government supposedly being responsible for making everyone go blind? My first thought was did they really adapt press secretary Scott McClellan’s book into a movie this fast? But then again, “Blindness” could be something experimental and new at the same time, another apocalyptic future film like “Children of Men.” Though being that director Fernando Meirelles is known in America primarily for making the intellectual thriller “The Constant Gardener” and the masterful “City of God," I’m going to stay with my first inkling and go with political thriller. My other inkling is that the cast will be brilliant, with Julianne Moore, Mark Ruffalo, Danny Glover, and Gael Garcia Bernal leading the way. Just I wonder will the script by Don McKellar, adapted from a novel by Jose Saramago, be as thought provoking, controversial, and eye opening as “The Constant Gardener” and “City of God”?

Julianne Moore plays a character basically called the Doctor’s wife. Everyone in the movie goes by a description instead of a name because everyone except the wife has suddenly turned blind. Thinking that this might be contagious, the blind are rounded up and placed in a sanitarium-like quarantine area where they are forced to re-build a society from scratch. Gael Garcia Bernal plays the King of Ward Three, a man who wields all the power because he has a gun and the choice of how to ration out all the food. Ruffalo is the doctor, an optometrist no less, who works with his wife to keep people as comfortable as possible, though if you see the conditions, you realize that its really not very possible at all.

This is one of those art-house films that tries to fool you into thinking it's more important than it actually is. It’s bleak and it’s depressing and it’s more of a commentary than it is an actual plot but there really isn’t much meaning behind all the unpleasantness. Screenwriter Don McKellar goes with the theory that society is one small thing away from complete anarchy and as people are herded like diseased animals into a dirty, dingy, and disgusting quarantine area and surrounded by heavily armed guards with guns, the stage is set to see the worst of humanity. People stumble around all over the place, even slipping on their own excrement on the floors. There is no food or clean water. No clean clothes. Dead bodies align the area because soon people actually do become diseased. Two groups are formed. The haves plot against the have-nots. If people want food, they are going to have to give away their valuables and later submit their women to be brutally raped and abused (and yes there is an offensively long scene featuring that). This movie is heartlessly cruel and incredibly hard to watch and at the same time tries to make a bland point that society would suffer from something like this. That’s really all we get for enduring such a bleak and depressing film, and the things the characters do during the societal breakdown seem so contrived that you really can’t even buy into it.

I didn’t understand how the King of Ward 3 garnered so much power by wielding a gun in front of so many. Couldn’t they just rush him and take the gun? Did they really have no other choice than to follow his orders? He’s blind. Does he really have much chance of hitting anything? And even so, how many bullets could a small revolver even have? Also, what’s the point of putting everyone in quarantine when almost all the world is infected? Or was the entire world infected? And what exactly caused this? And if it was the government, why would they do this? And why is it that the guards surrounding the area seem to be the only ones immune? We hear that government officials were infected by blindness as well but we are never told what happened to them? Were they given special treatment? Did they actually get to go to the hospital and have tests done while the rest suffered? This movie could have been a little more manageable had it not left so much open-ended, but then again, even the questions it does answer are done in half-assed fashion that just leads to more open-ended questions.

The acting saves this movie a little. Julianne Moore gives a brave and forceful performance in the lead role and Bernal is another stand-out, sinking his teeth into the movies key villain. The rest, including Mark Ruffalo and Danny Glover, just come off giving average performances that you could really care less about. Also the direction by Meirelles is all over the place. Sometimes he’ll show something dank and bleak, sometimes he’ll jump to nothing but white light to give us a POV of the characters, and sometimes he’ll give us oddly romanticized shots of people listening to the radio or laughing in the rain. There are a lot of shifts in tone but for the most part it just looks like a director getting a chance to play with his camera. None of it really adds much feeling to the movie at all.

“Blindness” looked like an interesting experiment from the outset. Something that possibly could have been provocatively political if done well but for the most part it's depressing and obvious and you either don’t buy much of it or wish they had done something with all the material they left open-ended. It’s really poorly conceived and a chore to watch and right now I’d say it's on the list for one of the worst movies of 2008.

Craig's Grade: D+

A	10.9%
B	41.8%
C	31.8%
D	15.3%
F	0.3%