Sunday, October 05, 2008
A+E, Movies, Reviews

Heavy-handed ‘Blindness’ loses focus

You'll wonder if Meirelles has lost his snap...

All of the filmmaking wonders that served Brazilian director Fernando Meirelles so well in the Oscar-nominated “City of God” and his English-language follow-up, “The Constant Gardner,” all but elude him with his latest effort, “Blindness.” The savvy use of shifting color palates, crisp editing and disciplined narrative are only on marginal display here, in a story so fraught with allegory, and so dreary in tone, that you wonder if Meirelles has lost his snap.

Adapted from Nobel Prize-winner José Saragmago’s 1995 novel about a plague that makes the whole world blind, the story focuses on a core group—led by a doctor (Mark Ruffalo) and his wife (Julianne Moore), the latter of whom seems impervious to the plague—that winds up with hundreds of others in a quarantined hospital that morphs into a cross between “The Lord of the Flies” and Abu Ghraib. As the system grows more and more insensitive to the situation (one might even say blind), the patients-turned-inmates are left to fend for themselves, with a renegade ward led by a menacing bartender (Gael Bernal Garcia) embracing survival of the fittest.

Where “City of God”—and to a lesser extent, “The Constant Gardner”—crackled with nerve and even, at times, humor, “Blindness” feels weighted down by its obvious metaphor. And so a transitional technique that might work well elsewhere—washing out the scene in a whited-out screen—becomes heavy-handed.

“Blindness” scored poorly at the Cannes Film Festival, moving Meirelles to cut out a movie-long narration voiceover by co-star Danny Glover. That’s a good start, but it doesn’t prove enough to help “Blindness” regain some vision. 2 STARS—David Lee Simmons