Susan Granger’s review of “Blindness” (Miramax Films)
Brazilian director Fernando Meirelles (“The Constant Gardener,” “City of God”) has ambitiously adapted Nobel-Prize-winning author Jose Saramago’s apocalyptic allegory in which the residents of a deliberately unspecified but primarily English-speaking city are afflicted by a mysterious epidemic that allows them to see only a milky-white blur.
First to be infected is a driver (Yusuke Iseya) who goes blind behind the wheel of his car. After that, each person he encounters – his wife (Yoshino Kimura), the ophthalmologist (Mark Ruffalo), other patients in the doctor’s office – lose their sight. As panic quickly spreads, government troops herd the newly blind and helpless into an abandoned mental institution, where anarchy soon reigns. An amoral, opportunistic bartender (Gael Garcia Bernal) takes control of the limited food supply, viciously demanding valuables and sexual favors from his vulnerable victims. But inside the chaotic, quarantined hospital, one woman is surreptitiously watching. The doctor’s wife (Julianne Moore) has feigned her symptoms in order to stay with her frightened husband and, eventually, she is able to lead out a rag-tag group of survivors.
Scripted by Don McKellar (who plays a thief) and directed by Meirelles, who hovers between realism and fantasy, it dilutes Saramago’s searing social fable, which reflects our flawed power systems, cruel prejudices and human fragility. As a result, the plot becomes a pedestrian thriller with a distracting voiceover narration by Danny Glover: “I don’t think we went blind. I think we were always blind.”
While Meirelles crafts memorable imagery, evoking concentration camps and the AIDS epidemic, and Julianne Moore delivers a tenderly sympathetic performance, it seems like another version of “28 Days Later.” On the Granger Movie Gauge of 1 to 10, “Blindness” is a dreary, symbolic 6, its significance undermined as unnamed characters cope with the inexplicable.
