Blind Man’s Bluff

Seeing-Eye Woman Leads the Blind through Perilous Times
by Morgan P Salvo
 Blindness is a strange movie. It’s like a diary of someone paralyzed by fear, a metaphor for socio-politico human tendencies, plus a vision of personal chaos and mass insanity. It also resembles 28 Days and all decent zombie flicks.
The premise of the movie is that select people (shown in specific incidences) are going blind, seeing white instead of darkness. A nice quote is, “I feel like I’m swimming in milk.” The disorder proves to be extremely contagious, and soon everyone’s swimming in milk, with the exception of Julianne Moore’s character who is inexplicably not stricken by the oddball plague. The first few people afflicted are put in stark isolation prisons, left to fend for themselves in their “wards”. Suffering neglect and brutality, they are literally out of sight and out of mind. The quarantine camps become very symbolic of how blindly we humans go into things.

It doesn’t matter that the reason everyone goes blind is never established or that the weird acceptance of being blind is radically subdued. What permeates the movie is the character study of the role of doctor’s wife (Julianne Moore), who pretends to go blind to help her afflicted doctor husband (Mark Ruffalo). Blindness focuses on her decisions to be helpful and sometimes incapacitated. As the only person in the camp who can see, she chooses martyrdom so many times it adds frustration to any empathy. It’s Moore’s characters’ duty to lead only when needed. It emphasizes the theory that when left to their own devices, humans rely on gut feelings and primal instincts.
Blindness is told in a kind of fairy tale meets Midnight Express form. In fact it’s so in “make believe land” that when Eye Patch (Danny Glover) tells the others in the ward of the saddening affect the blindness plague has on the whole world he gives it with a bedtime story inflection.
After some unrest among the blind in different wards the movie takes a Lord of the Flies turn wherein regime power rules. People will give up anything valuable, even their own flesh for copulation in order to survive. The greed of some and the wimpiness of others make it hard to feel sorry for anyone. Undercurrents of anarchy, socialism and democracy run through the blatant abuse handed out from and to the inmates. There are stabs at compassion but this seems a lesson in futility. Near the end, when the entire planet is infected, it resembles a contagion-gone-haywire zombie movie…my favorite part.
The actors reliably steer their way through the sometimes meandering path this movie takes. Ruffalo does his soft-spoken, understanding, wuss role here. Moore does her I-feel-the-world’s-pain role. Among the fill-the-gaps-character actor parts are Gael Garcia Bernal, Alice Braga and the indie great, Maury Chaykin. People are never called by names and the credits keep their anonymity to the end: Doctor, doctor’s wife, man with eye-patch, woman with dark glasses etc.
Director Meirelles who has two movies under his belt that I have seen, City of God and the Constant Gardener, proves again to have supreme artistic vision. The film has a European feel and like the unnamed characters, was shot in an anonymous city. The cinematography and the moving camera with washed out celluloid (resembling grainy black and white) adds an almost itchy feeling to an already creepy environment of quarantined victims living in ultra squalor. Meirelles is a genius for setting up dramatic tricks: It’s as though he adds life to scenes only to pluck it away right before your very eyes. An extremely nice touch is the white-out between scenes.
Blindness is ultimately a testament to the human spirit and the unnecessary evils of the world. As a straight forward story it has quite a few plot gaps and inconsistencies, but it’s a voyage of one compelling scene after another. Witnessing what these people go through will make you feel the grime and dirt, but thanks to a somewhat uplifting ending, you might feel somewhat cleansed by the time you leave the theater.

Blindness
Starring Julianne Moore, Mark Ruffalo, Gael Garcia Bernal, Danny Glover, Alice Braga
Director: Fernando Meirelles
 3 stars