Blindness

Why is it that allegories are so much more effective in literature than in film? One wouldn't think that film would be knocked out of the equation as a vessel. Why can't an image be representational in the way prose can? The answer is that it can, but it's just much trickier to achieve. We process images in a way that represents surface and reality (even though we know that images can be falsified) but what we read, we understand as manipulated by the author. We experience it through a filter and it allows us a lot of room to project. It's easier for an idea to flower in writing than take root in imagery. Or that's my on-the-spot take on it at any rate.

Which brings us to Blindness...


Celebrated auteur Fernando Meirelles set himself the daunting task of adapting a difficult flexible novel. Blindness the novel is told in omniscient narrator fashion with no punctuation, no character names, no traditionally conveyed dialogue and a big inescapable allegory as central driving force, plot, worldview. In the novel the world is struck by "the white sickness." Eyes everywhere start failing, vision milking over with nothing but whiteness. In movie terms that's a fade-to-white. Meirelles puts it in movie terms ... a lot.

Among the first victims is an eye doctor played by the always welcome Mark Ruffalo (still searching for a role equal to his breakout bid in You Can Count on Me). His wife (Julianne Moore), still blessed with perfect vision, accompanies him to the government mandated containment facility under the pretense that she too has succumbed to the sickness. Her instincts to protect her husband prove solid. The blind, as it turns out, are practically abandoned once they're caged. All Lord of the Flies style hell breaks loose.

Julianne Moore has spent 2008 returning to the auteurial drama she is most suited for (see also: Savage Grace) and moviegoers are better off for it. Highlights from the ensemble cast include a moving Danny Glover and a memorably wicked Gael Garcia Bernal. Everyone aboard seems game for the brutal material. True to the novel no characters are given names but since the film is not overtly stylized elsewhere or in dialogue this device feels illogical and, well, straight up weird in this new context. People meeting and introducing themselves only by profession after society is breaking down? Hard to fathom.

Moore, referred to only as "the doctor's wife", is a steadying seeing-eye presence for the afflicted souls in the movie and for the audience, too. She's solid in what's a subtle and difficult role but the director leans so heavily on her capacity for internal drama that he almost smothers her. We're left with only her numbed face and weary gait to convey what the film is so curiously shy about. Much of the book's horrific power came from the descriptions of the animalistic living conditions that the blind begin to live with. Meirelles opts to mostly look away from the nudity (who would wear dirty clothes for weeks on end when everyone is blind?) and he's particularly shy with the prison act. The cool desaturated palette chosen effectively hides the very off-putting but necessary horror that the novel achieved. That was surely a practical decision --who, outside of early John Waters thespians, wants to get too equated with shit (or piss) in a movie theater? -- but as a result the prison looks messy and cluttered rather than truly harrowing. For a movie that understands how to convey complete confinement and humans-as-animals terror you'll have to wait for Steve McQueen's daring aggressive Hunger in 2009. Blindness is often beautifully stylized in its cinematography but beauty and this story aren't the most complimentary match.

The novel by José Saramago is a heavy allegorical classic about our collective inability to see. It is not actually about the fact that some people are disabled and have no visual or form light perception. The film version of this great novel, while admirably serious and surprisingly faithful, just doesn't let in as much light. In the realm of surface storytelling it's solid but it falls short thematically and loses much of its depth. Blindness does try and capture something of the novel's grace. Meirelles and his cinematographer César Charlone seem to loosen up in the story's final post-prison act. It's as if the open air let's down their guard sufficently. Once there's promise of a fuller range of human experience they allow themselves to look more closely at the continued horror in the margins and with less stylistic strain.

Blindness's source material is strong and the concerted effort from the cast keep you rapt to the unusual story but it finally feels a little flat. The book remains a much richer and more vividly imaginative work. It's a mark of a movie's failure if you can shake it off quickly after the credits roll. Great comedies can leave you giggling or smiling for days afterwards rather than vanishing from memory. Great horror can have you checking under your bed or sleeping with the lights on. Great dramas can wrestle thought for days. A week after seeing Blindness the only thought it provoked in yours truly was this 'Can the movie version of The Road more successfully transfer apocalyptic literature to the screen?' B-/C+