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Review: “Blindness”
By Kyle | October 3, 2008
UNFOCUSED
Kyle Smith review of “Blindness”
2.5 stars out of 4
121 minutes/Rated R
The themes of “Blindness” go by in a blur. When large numbers of people in a nameless cosmopolis are suddenly struck blind, the vagueness seems so deliberate that the allegory could be steering our attention to AIDS, Marxism, feminism, pacifism, the surreal craziness of Latin American dictatorship or the ultimate Christian triumph of the golden rule.
“The Constant Gardener” director Fernando Mereilles situates the outbreak in an unidentified city where people of all nationalities seem to freely mingle. When a motorist suddenly loses his sight while his car is stopped at a traffic light, the shocking ease with which total strangers slip into bad Samaritanism sets the grim tone. You don’t normally expect a movie to be this unpleasant to sit through unless it’s about the Holocaust or was directed by Edward Burns.
Blindness seems to be contagious, and soon so many people have been struck blind that an authoritarian government forces them into an abandoned metal hospital where they’re held prisoner at gunpoint and occasionally given boxes of food by unsympathetic soldiers in hazmat suits. Among them are an ophthalmologist (Mark Ruffalo), a hooker (Alice Braga), a kindly geezer (Danny Glover) and the ophthalmologist’s wife (Julianne Moore), who can see but pretends to be blind also so she can look after her man. Why she alone is immune is a mystery; she’s sort of like the doctor in “The Plague.”
As the wards fill up with helpless victims, the halls teem with garbage and human waste. Ruffalo’s character serves as a wise leader who tries to keep everyone calm. He faces opposition in a younger man (Gael Garcia Bernal), who declares himself dictator—first jokingly, then not. The Bernal figure starts to seize food supplies as they come in, and he backs his threats with a gun that seems to be loaded with an unlimited number of bullets. (Why doesn’t Moore’s character simply sneak up on him and disarm him?)
Things that shouldn’t matter anymore suddenly matter more than ever—race, money, jewels. Jose Saramago, the Nobel-winning author of the book that inspired the movie, goes for an indoor “Lord of the Flies” feel.
The point is made with touches of black comedy and a grim mise en scene that suggests a claustrophobic apocalypse. The streets empty out—everyone is afraid to drive when anyone else on the road can be struck blind at any moment—leaving a deserted cityscape like the one in “28 Days Later.” And the masses of blind people behave a bit like the zombies in that film. A mass rape played with a “Clockwork Orange” jauntiness led to more than a few walkouts at the screening I attended at the relatively unshockable Toronto Film Festival. Also shocking is the presence of a “real” blind person—a fellow who was born blind and is consequently much more at ease in this dark world. He takes the side of the dictator.
A cinematographer’s toybox, the movie suggests blindness by glare, bursts of light, overexposures, double exposures, shadows, backlighting, characters speaking off camera and a dozen other tricks that at times make you think the whole thing could be compressed a bit—to, perhaps, the length of a “Twilight Zone” episode, which is basically what “Blindness” amounts to.
I kept hoping the meaning would click into place, but it never quite did. The story seems designed to apply to whatever fear is nibbling around your subconscious. I suppose it could even be about global warming, though it was written before that became a fashionable cause.
What finally irked me, though, wasn’t so much the ugliness of its view of humanity as the ease with which the story ends. If the moral is that we all ought to be nice to each other, it isn’t quite enough with which to close out such a strange, sometimes harrowing and sometimes wicked movie.
Topics: Movies |