Friday
03Oct2008
Movie Review - 'Blindness'
Friday, October 3, 2008 at 12:01AM BlindnessStarring 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.
Reader Comments (5)
Apart from the criticism you made on the technical aspects of this movie, which I'm yet to see and obviously cannot comment on, you seem to have disliked the whole narrative part. As you do not mention that this movie is based on a novel by Nobel prize laureate José Saramago, I'll assume you've neglected this fact. Like I've said, I haven't watched the movie, but I'm anxiously waiting for an opportunity.
Now, I've read a lot of Saramago's novels, and the list of things you are seem to be so critical about, are the most obvious characteristics style as a writer. You can easily verify this on wikipedia, despite the low quality of the english version of the article. I've taken the liberty of pasting some parts of it here to shed some light on my argument.
"Saramago’s novels often deal with fantastic scenarios, such as that in his 1986 novel, The Stone Raft, wherein the Iberian Peninsula breaks off from the rest of Europe and sails about the Atlantic Ocean. In his 1995 novel, Blindness, an entire unnamed country is stricken with a mysterious plague of “white blindness”. In his 1984 novel, The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis (which won the PEN Award and the Independent Foreign Fiction Award), Fernando Pessoa’s heteronym survives for a year after the poet himself dies. Additionally, his upcoming novel Death with Interruptions centers around a country in which nobody dies over the course of one New Year's Day and how the country reacts to the spiritual and political implications of the event."
"In his novels Blindness and The Cave, Saramago sometimes abandons the use of proper nouns; indeed, the difficulty of naming is a recurring theme in his work."
This comment is getting too long, but I guess I've made my point that I trust that Meireles is simply being faithful to his inspirational source. And he should. Personally, I'd say that's one more reason to look forward to seeing this movie.
Sorry, but I think you’ve got a few things wrong. When you say "There might be a lesson here, but I can't see it" it seems that you're expecting something that Saramago never intended to give. In my opinion there's no lesson, no moral, nothing to learn. There are just human beings facing very extreme circumstances.
The story tries to analyze how different people react differently to epidemic diseases, incarceration, hunger, lack of human dignity and absolute lack of hope. It’s not particularly about being blind more than being held in a concentration camp by the nazis or the sudden death of all male individuals (in Y: The Last Man).
And the movie tries to make the audience feel what the characters are feeling: the desperation of facing the sudden end of everything considered to be civilization, to which we build our everyday lives on. In my opinion Meirelles managed to do that just fine. For a couple hours you can almost feel what it would be like to go to similar circumstances and how fragile is our whole civilization and everything we take for granted in our lives.
For all that I consider Blindness a better movie than City of God. The story in this one is more rich, meaningful and allows much greater reflection than the story in City of God, which is fun, but little more than a good gangster tale that takes place in a very typical brazilian favela instead of 1930’s New York or Chicago.
Regardless of the source material, my job is to review movies. I can't possibly read every book that's turned into a motion picture, nor is it my responsibility to do so. Furthermore, since there's not a studio or a producer or a director on Earth who wants to make a movie only for people who have read the novel, source material is usually irrelevant. I'm not reviewing the book, and I'm not reviewing how well it translates to film.
I hated Nights in Rodanthe; nobody told me to read that book.
The issue with Blindness is this: I never felt sympathy for these characters. I felt completely detached from the whole experience. I suspect that's because it was so obvious that I was watching a movie. That may sound silly, but I was so completely aware of the director's presence, through odd angles and establishing shots and as I mention in the review, the cinematography, that I felt it impossible to connect with the characters. There's a reason kids never see Jim Henson operating the Muppets. In this case, I saw the guy pulling the strings.
The ending was also ludicrous for a moviegoer. If you want to debate that, you can send me an e-mail, because I don't want to spoil it, but it was a heaping helping of dissatisfaction for me. It just made the journey seem pointless.
http://volume124.wordpress.com/2008/11/06/blindness-2008-dir-fernando-meirelles/
Blindness is a nice refreshment in the niche of apocalyptic movies. Plot is intriguing, characters are well developed. We see how people can turn into the different persons in special situation.