David O'ConnellBlindness
March 13th 2009 02:29
In an unnamed city a male driver suddenly goes blind in a gridlocked street. This bizarre, inexplicable occurrence will later have repercussions for everyone he comes into contact with as an epidemic rolls over the city like a wave of infection. The cause remains unclear and seems of little interest to director Fernando Meirelles, feted for his work on City of God and The Constant Gardener; here he’s working with Don McKellar’s adaptation of a novel by Jose Saramago and for a while his tone is an uncertain one.
There’s a clinical nature to the film, with a deliberate artificiality in the bleaching out of colours, saturating the internal scenes with electric light. Early on, a host of interconnected people are introduced but the main focus is on the Doctor (Mark Ruffalo) who treats the first case, and his wife (Julianne Moore). When he loses his sight too, a victim of the “white sickness” that government broadcasts later refer to, attention shifts to a quarantine facility where the middle section of the film takes place. It’s here that much of this strange, allegorical drama plays out like an alternate version of Lord of the Flies set in a mental asylum.
Armed troops dump increasing numbers inside the facility where, feared infectious, they’re left to fend for themselves. Luckily they have an imposter in their midst, the Doctor’s wife who's only pretending to be blind in a ploy to remain with her husband. In this rapidly expanding Kingdom of the Blind she's their Queen, a consoling den mother, but even she can only watch on helplessly as a radical devolvement takes place, the wards turned into pigsties by these frustrated, uncomprehending swarms of sightless people.
Outside, the place resembles a Nazi death camp with barbed-wire fences and gun-toting soldiers who mow down any inmates attempting to flee the grounds, whilst inside the Doctor tries to initiate a system of peaceful co-existence, a mini-society, but his unstructured ideas are met with resistance at every turn.
Removed from any external context, the world at large vanishing, the facility becomes a microcosm of every societal failing, the afflictions of the many applied to a few. Naturally a figure of evil will emerge in the form of Ward 3’s leader (Gael Garcia Bernal) who somehow procures a gun, managing to become a leader by force, using depravity and amoral blackmail to feed the wants and desires of he and his cohorts.
It’s a predictable descent into inhumanity with too few people worth caring about, though Ruffalo and Moore try hard with a flawed screenplay to inject some depth into their characters. Alice Braga and Danny Glover, along for the ride in the central core of players, make the most of their screen time too, but this is a film concerned more with concepts than fully fleshed-out human components.
Despite the unbelievable, though eerie scenario, the second half does become more interesting after you’ve accepted the deliberately cold manner of establishing it - stripping this world of identity and assigning the people numbers and occupations rather than names. The post-apocalyptic scenes of the final section contain some genuinely disturbing moments as chaos takes control of the ugly, defaced remnants of this anonymous city but there are so many, consciously it seems, unanswered questions.
Ultimately, Blindness plays out like a parable, a global warning with a vaguely interesting central conceit. Whilst Saramago’s novel hasn’t necessarily translated into compelling drama, it’s at least been rendered with a unique visual style by Meirelles – potentially off-putting and alienating too, but making it a film worth watching, even if I’d be hard pressed to say I actually liked it.
There’s a clinical nature to the film, with a deliberate artificiality in the bleaching out of colours, saturating the internal scenes with electric light. Early on, a host of interconnected people are introduced but the main focus is on the Doctor (Mark Ruffalo) who treats the first case, and his wife (Julianne Moore). When he loses his sight too, a victim of the “white sickness” that government broadcasts later refer to, attention shifts to a quarantine facility where the middle section of the film takes place. It’s here that much of this strange, allegorical drama plays out like an alternate version of Lord of the Flies set in a mental asylum.
Armed troops dump increasing numbers inside the facility where, feared infectious, they’re left to fend for themselves. Luckily they have an imposter in their midst, the Doctor’s wife who's only pretending to be blind in a ploy to remain with her husband. In this rapidly expanding Kingdom of the Blind she's their Queen, a consoling den mother, but even she can only watch on helplessly as a radical devolvement takes place, the wards turned into pigsties by these frustrated, uncomprehending swarms of sightless people.
Doctor (Mark Ruffalo) and wife (Julianne Moore)
Outside, the place resembles a Nazi death camp with barbed-wire fences and gun-toting soldiers who mow down any inmates attempting to flee the grounds, whilst inside the Doctor tries to initiate a system of peaceful co-existence, a mini-society, but his unstructured ideas are met with resistance at every turn.
Removed from any external context, the world at large vanishing, the facility becomes a microcosm of every societal failing, the afflictions of the many applied to a few. Naturally a figure of evil will emerge in the form of Ward 3’s leader (Gael Garcia Bernal) who somehow procures a gun, managing to become a leader by force, using depravity and amoral blackmail to feed the wants and desires of he and his cohorts.
It’s a predictable descent into inhumanity with too few people worth caring about, though Ruffalo and Moore try hard with a flawed screenplay to inject some depth into their characters. Alice Braga and Danny Glover, along for the ride in the central core of players, make the most of their screen time too, but this is a film concerned more with concepts than fully fleshed-out human components.
Despite the unbelievable, though eerie scenario, the second half does become more interesting after you’ve accepted the deliberately cold manner of establishing it - stripping this world of identity and assigning the people numbers and occupations rather than names. The post-apocalyptic scenes of the final section contain some genuinely disturbing moments as chaos takes control of the ugly, defaced remnants of this anonymous city but there are so many, consciously it seems, unanswered questions.
Ultimately, Blindness plays out like a parable, a global warning with a vaguely interesting central conceit. Whilst Saramago’s novel hasn’t necessarily translated into compelling drama, it’s at least been rendered with a unique visual style by Meirelles – potentially off-putting and alienating too, but making it a film worth watching, even if I’d be hard pressed to say I actually liked it.
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