Movie Review: “Blindness”
Alice Braga in “Blindness.”
Rating: 39
Fernando Meirelles’ “Blindness” aspires to explore the darker corners of the human condition — a “Lord of the Flies”-style parable in which society breaks down when nearly everyone goes blind. But Meirelles has created little more than an art-house zombie movie with fewer brains — literally and figuratively — than George Romero’s “Dawn of the Dead.”
“Blindness” opens in an anonymous city (it was largely filmed in Sao Paulo, Brazil) where a Japanese man goes blind behind the wheel at an intersection. He paws at his eyes as the traffic behind him turns nasty, and when a bystander (played by screenwriter Don McKellar) offers to drive him home, he steals the man’s car.
The man turns out to be “patient zero” in an epidemic, and it spreads to his ophthalmologist (Mark Ruffalo) and many other patients including a young boy (Mitchell Nye) and a call girl (Alice Braga). The government quickly quarantines the afflicted, and while the eye doctor’s wife (Julianne Moore) is strangely immune, she goes along with him to the crumbling hospital/prison.
Sanitary and social conditions quickly devolve as the quarantined break into factions, and the food supply is controlled by a psychopath (Gael Garcia Bernal) and a blind-by-birth accountant (Maury Chaykin). They subjugate the others, forcing the women to become concubines in exchange for food as word trickles in about the breakdown of the world outside.
No one has a name in “Blindness,” but that is appropriate: the film is populated by archetypes rather than characters and a situation rather than a story. Meirelles, the gifted director of “The Constant Gardener” and “City of God,” delivers an infuriating copout ending that arrives without delivering a coherent message, indicating that Meirelles’ own vision for “Blindness” is frustratingly blurry.
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