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Movie Review - 'Blindness'

Written by bigpicture on

From: getthebigpicture.net

Blindness

Starring Julianne Moore, Mark Ruffalo, and Gael Garcia Bernal
Directed by Fernando Meirelles
Rated R

It's a tough position to be in, wanting something to be better than it is. I don't have kids, but if I did, I imagine I'd have to pretend to like a lot of school plays and soccer games. Chicago Cubs fans have had to pretend for 100 years that they actually believe this is the year, despite evidence to the contrary (again).

With Blindness, I wanted badly to appreciate it more than it deserves. I just can't.

In 2002, I discovered a little movie called City of God. I shared it with everyone I could. At the time, it was not yet nominated for four Oscars and had no reputation as being one of the best films of the decade. That came later. But I sold it hard and professed the talents of its director, Fernando Meirelles.

Now, of course, everybody knows what City of God is, and the fact that it's currently ranked 19th on the IMDB list of the greatest films ever - between Raiders of the Lost Ark and Once Upon a Time in the West - is no big surprise. If you haven't watched it, it really is among the two or three dozen best films I've ever seen.

In 2006, Meirelles directed The Constant Gardener, an underrated and very depressing film that nonetheless won Rachel Weisz a well-deserved Academy Award. It wasn't a step up, because that would've been nearly impossible, but it firmly established him as an important director.

And here we are today with Blindness; Meirelles has not reminded us of his former glory.

Though the film has, in my opinion, the most interesting cinematography of the year in terms of its use of color and imagery, the story is an absolute disaster and many of the actors are so completely unrestrained that I wouldn't blame you for walking out. This is a very hard film to watch. I, of course, reserved some hope that the end would justify the means, but it didn't work out that way.

A pandemic of sudden blindness spreads throughout the land. We don't know what country this is, exactly. It looks like Europe, maybe one of the modernized cities in Spain, but the U.S. dollar is the currency and the population is a regular United Colors of Benetton ad. The implication, I guess, is that this could happen anywhere at any time. (Blindness was shot in Uruguay, Brazil, and Canada.)

An ophthalmologist (Mark Ruffalo) diagnoses a patient who went blind in his car, and though he feels no pain, can only see white, the presence of all light, as opposed to black. The next morning, the doctor wakes up blind. So does most of the rest of civilization. The doctor's wife (Julianne Moore) is spared. She can see perfectly. When the quarantine of the blind is put into effect, the wife fakes blindness to be with her husband.

The quarantine is as you'd expect: The government throws its unwanted masses into an abandoned hospital, hands them a few boxes of food, locks the gate, and says, "You're on your own."

We're supposed to learn from the metaphor that follows. These people don't have to be blind, they just have to be stranded, nervous, and forced into a position to choose life for themselves or life for their fellow captives. There are "wards" of patients in this lockdown, all of which name their own leader and take on the personality of its new chief. One of the wards is evil, wants all the food for itself, and will only distribute it to the others at great personal sacrifice.

Once the secondary drama kicks in, once we're over the fact that people just lost the ability to see for no reason, Blindness is simply an embarrassing motion picture. The scenes get more and more drastic, but because of the environment, this is more like one of those exploitation movies from the 70s that takes place in a woman's prison than it is a serious analysis of human nature. It's like Caged Heat with a really good director.

Worse still is the way the conflict within the hospital is resolved and the action that follows it. There might be a lesson here, but I can't see it. So maybe I'm the one who's blind.

Because the mere fact that the world goes blind is pushed to a greater extreme - a less-than-realistic plane even - the actors lose sight of the humanity in their characters. Julianne Moore can be a great actress, but she can overact better than anyone else in her generation, and she's on that path again here. Gael Garcia Bernal, the risk-taking Mexican star of Amores Perros and Y Tu Mama Tambien, is so one-dimensional and outlandish that he makes the villains in Death Race seem restrained by comparison.

There will be better films by Fernando Meirelles, just as there have been better films pursuing this metaphor. I sense that he really tried to make Blindness into a great movie, but he has very clearly failed.

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