Review: Blindness

**** / *****

King of Ward 3: "Hey Lady, I will not forget your voice.
Doctor's Wife: And I won't forget your face!"

Blindness opened Cannes last year, and it didn't do well there. Nor anywhere else, for that matter. The print included a supposedly disastrous voice-over by Danny Glover (since stripped from the final cut), and it was perhaps undone by expectations that it might be a different kind of film - a Big Idea kind of film. I think Blindness is the kind of film that wouldn't have existed if it hadn't been a book first.

It's an adaptation of the 1995 novel by Nobel Prize winner José Saramago (a personal hero of mine), and at first blush it seems to fall into the same mold as Children of Men: a "serious" film that uses the sci-fi premise of a near-future dystopia to comment on the modern-day dystopia already upon us. But the trouble with expectations is that they tend to numb one to what's really at hand. Saramago's "Ensaio Sobre a Cegueira" (which would translate as "Essay on Blindness") was an allegory about spiritual blindness and about humanity's lack of compassion for strangers. Blindness, the film, pushes the Big Ideas aside for a brutalizing exploration into the hard fact that humans, in the right circumstances, will turn desperate and even barbarous.

The catalyst is an outbreak of blindness in a city that is intentionally vague, its citizens casually multinational (as is its terrific cast, which does a lot within the restrictions of limited screen time). Ruffalo plays an ophthalmologist who unknowingly spreads the infectious disease from its first case to a waiting room full of patients and on to concentric circles of panicky outbreak.

None of the characters are named, which is one of the many signature marks of Saramago that Meirelles stayed loyal; they're listed in the credits, and referred to by descriptive appellations as the "Doctor" and the "Doctor's Wife." The latter (played by the marvellous Julianne Moore) is introduced whipping into submission a tiramisu for her distracted husband. When he wakes in the morning with the "white sickness" (the blindness is unique in that the infected see white, rather than black), she makes a rash decision to feign blindness, too, in order to join him in the government-issued quarantine. One senses the decision was borne as much from helplessness as self-sacrifice.

The sick are shipped off to an abandoned insane asylum and more or less left to fend for themselves, and there the secretly sighted Doctor's Wife becomes witness to unending awfulness as conditions deteriorate and a turf war ensues. We become witness, too, and it's a long, hard slough: Meireilles - no stranger to harsh climes, having previously touched down in the favelas of Rio and a Kenya ravaged by disease and - unflinchingly charts every slipped rung down to the bottomest depths of human degradation. Frequent cuts to white screen aside, there is very little lightness here. Meireilles plays on that whiteness, in one instance using it to soft-shoe a morally complicated sex scene, then abruptly cutting to full-colour to expose it for what it really is, which is the desperate rutting of the doomed.

There are no pulled punches here, and within that same morally complicated universe, Meireilles and screenwriter Don McKellar (who co-stars) demonstrate a scope and a sensibility expansive enough to meet every devil with some sympathy and every joy with commensurate sorrow. All this, I think, would be unbearable without Moore, who masterfully characterizes the devoted wife's metamorphosis into a heroicism both unwanted and unheralded. It's a rattling, heart-rending performance in, yes, a long, excruciatingly hard slough of a film - one that always remains one step behind brilliance and that is well worth the journey, if not a repeat trip.