a movie review by brandon: blindness

Blindness- **

I read about half of this book just outside of college and, well, I was about done with books. It was good, but it was too dark, heady, and allegorical for me at the time. I put it down, promising to pick it back up later, and so time passed to 2008, when I first heard about the film.

Blindness is about what happens when civilization breaks down and people start following their baser instincts (the actual blindness is really just a MacGuffin). His prose is light and quick, bringing the horror of the situation home without immersing you in squalor (he's one of those authors who writes for the joy of prose itself, as opposed to plot or character).

Unfortunately, the movie doesn’t believe in the same things the author does.

An epidemic of blindness begins to attack the population, including a doctor (Mark Ruffalo) and his wife (Julianne Moore). Moore pretends blindness in order to be quarantined with her husband in an abandoned mental hospital. Things are fine at first, but as the epidemic grows, the hospital becomes less and less civilized, with people wandering naked, crapping in the halls, and gnashing their teeth. Enter The King of Ward 3 (Gael Garcia Bernal), a sadistic man who ruthlessly takes control of the hospital, and then enters into all kinds of rape and murder. Yay!

The problem with adapting a book like this is that you can't just film the plot. The book is about prose and allegory, so you need to tweak the film in order to get it to convey meaning through style, the way the novel did. But the screenwriter just writes the plot, and director Fernando Mierelles just immerses you into squalor. This worked in his brilliant City of God, but less so in the way overrated Constant Gardener, and even less here.

Maybe the rumors that he wasn't fully behind City of God are true, since he's been lacking ever since. There are ways to convey horror other than people squishing liquid shit between their toes, or being beaten to death during a rape. But Mierelles doesn't seem to know them.

The movie also doesn't seem to know what it is. It's an extremely unpleasant story, and just being as unpleasant as possible doesn’t engage an audience. And since there's no character development, there's no one to care about. The actors do their best, but it ain't much. By the underwhelming ending, you just feel dirty and abused, and you don't know what the point was.

Yeah. People are assholes, we all know that. I don't need two hours of awful to slam it home.

click to view the trailer: