Blindness

Blindness – 2008

*½ Out of ****

Blindness is less of a film, then an ambitiously empty metaphor; wholly vivid, but a portion as successful. This allegorical disaster film is a simultaneously unpleasant assault on numerous senses and glazes its viewers with a layer of scum and grime, that steel wool and bleach could not remove. Earnest credit is certainly due for director Fernando Meirelles, who has helmed some very successful blunt, tragic works such as City of God and The Constant Gardener. His talent is vacant here, consumed by the difficult source material and questionable technical elections.

It would be unfair, and indeed inaccurate to label Meirelles as a pompous filmmaker, but with this effort, his self-indulgence is rampant. Symbolism consumes most semblances of what could be deemed a coherent and authentic narrative and the films agenda, while not itself a problem, is jammed down our throats using abrupt and ugly means. Providing further determent is the radical tonal shift that persists throughout all three acts. The first, and most successful portion, is a slow build up as the contagious disease of milky blindness patiently consumes an unknown city. We are introduced to a group of unnamed victims (a device which parallels the lack of sight smartly) including an eye doctor and his wife, played by Mark Ruffalo and Julianne Moore respectively, a thief (DonMcKeller, who also wrote the screenplay) ‘the girl with the sun glasses’ (Alice Braga), a man with an eye patch (Danny Glover) the first blind man and his wife (Yusuke Iseya and Yoshino Kimura) a young boy (Mitchell Nye) and others. The wrinkle, however is that the doctor’s wife can see, yet stays by her husband’s side to ensure his safety and show her love.

The following act ramps up, and becomes a prison movie spliced with the disaster scenario in which the infected are quarantined by the government and forced to ration out limited food and viscously feud with the residents of other wards in the complex. Here the film becomes ugly and vile and diminishes any respect or sense of connection to the group of blind. In the attempt to create a world, where ordinary people are forced to break down to their primal instincts, the Darwinian atmosphere that takes form ranges from preposterous, especially involving a number of scenarios with the doctor’s wife to abject, past any reasonable level.

The film concludes with the group breaking free of their combines and rejoining the world, which was unable to be saved despite the extreme government procedures. Bodies litter the once flowing streets, and wild dogs feast upon the dead, but in the land of the blind, the one eyed man is king (so I guess that makes her god?) and the wife leads the clan to their home to escape the ravages of the outside world. This portion is an infusion of hapless melodrama and what feels like reality television, with the ragtag group living under one roof, without sight; Big Brother: Blindness. The radical and consistent yawing of the films grain is brutally jarring, especially the ending which after the brutality of the prison scenes is outright asinine.

After everything settles however, no questions spawn answers; why did this happen, why can Julianne Moore’s character see, what happened on the outside and it all becomes a perfunctory affair. Performances range from uneven (Moore) to bland (Ruffalo) to cringe worthy. The score (if it can be called such) is a cacophony of clangs and clashes, bashing pots, odd yelps, distorted instruments, complimented by the inflated volume of gunshots, screams and the like. The visuals are certainly intriguing but are at times over-exposed and at times under, with a distinct overuse of the first person ‘blind vision’ gimmick. Overall, this film left me with a recognizable feeling; the same was felt after watching the hostel movies, which is never a positive indication. And while nowhere near as awful and repugnant as those abominations, they had a similar lack of purpose and clear intent of where the visceral punches were supposed to lead us. At best, this can be viewed as an accomplished failure about those who loose their most precious sense. Here’s hoping that you will not lose one of yours, common, and avoid Blindness.