Blindness, an example of allegory by film, was a film that left me enjoying its depth of exploration of what amounts to a social psychological experiment one minute and frustrated and repulsed by it the next. I think that's why though it aspired to reach high in cinema standards, it fell fairly short. It's a film that you really want to like but can't.


This film opens, showing a bustling if unidentified metropolis and one of its defining aspects, a traffic jam. However, in the midst of what appears to be an ordinary day begins something extraordinary.

One driver (played by Japanese actor, Yusuke Iseya) suddenly becomes the focus of attention and ire by others when his vehicle stops. It turns out that in the blink of an eye, his world has turned into a sea of white and he's gone blind. So it begins with Patient Zero as everyone who comes into contact with Iseya's character and later on an opthamologist (played by You can Count on Me's Mark Ruffalo) experiences the same blindness. The unexplained plague spreads and the government begins cracking down on the populace by quarantining the newly blinded people in an abandoned mental health facility, which provides the setting where most of the film takes place.

Stock characters, all of them nameless, are introduced, including a call girl with dark glasses (Brazilian actress, Alice Braga of City of God), a thief (played by this film's screen writer, Don Mckellar), the lonely child (Mitchell Nye) and the elderly sage (a deft turn by Danny Glover).

Besides Glover and Ruffalo, the cast are mostly international actors, more known in their respective countries which adds to the film as too many big names would have drawn attention from the fact that the characters consist of fairly average people thrown together in a very unusual situation and forced to cope with it. The only other big name is Julianne Moore, who plays Ruffalo's wife and in a twist, is apparently the only individual who can still see.

The film quickly narrows its scope from society in general and looks at a small group of its victims in a microcosm. At first, there's a communal feel to a group of mostly strangers left to their own devices by a society that keeps them at a distance. However, being that these individuals are representative of larger society and all its prejudices, conflicts and hierarchical relationships, soon enough different factions emerge. One led by Ruffalo and the other by bartender, (played by Mexican actor and hearthrob Gael García Bernal) which soon enough turns to a rendition of Lord of the Flies.

At this point, it seems as if you're watching a prison gang film as brutal violence including rapes and beatings takes place. Some scenes are so appalling including one where the women in one of the "tribes" submit to what amounts to gang rape to procure food for their survival after they've run out of valuables to trade. The women come back, and silently wash the blood off the body of one of the more unfortunate (or perhaps fortunate?) of their own who was beaten to death while the men stand by helpless and emasculated by their situation where in a free enterprise economy gone bad, the only thing they have to sell is their women.

Curiously enough after the rape scene, the power shifts towards Moore (and to a lessor extent the other women) even more so than it did because she had sight. And then she engages in acts which in all likelihood days earlier in a different world would have been unthinkable to her. But this film is about making choices and facing decisions that are unimaginable outside of the circumstances that have been thrown at these characters. It also addresses the power dynamics between the characters, including those played by Moore, Glover and a blind-from-birth accountant played by the wonderful Maury Chaykin.

There's a saying that in the world of the blind, the one-eyed man is king and Glover's character was already half-blind before the "white sickness" hit but in this world, each side has a "ringer". Moore who has sight, a fact she reveals to no one for most of the film and Chaykin's blind man who is the right hand man of Bernal but is really running the show. It's played out in different scenes including one where Moore and Bernal inevitably face off. Bernal yells that he'll remember her voice and then Moore answers back, I'll remember your face.

The portion of the film that takes place in this make-shift society is both its most challenging and most frustrating. The violence including the fact that most of it is directed at women is almost enough to turn people off the film and in fact it literally did at several preview showings.

The film attracted protests by blind individuals for its portrayal of characters who are unable to do anything for themselves including keep themselves clean and living in surroundings strewn with garbage, bodily waste and behaving in some ways savagely towards each other almost like animals. That's a valid complaint which is tempered slightly by the fact that many of the characters are newly blind and abandoned by their own country, but what's also disappointing about the film is how there's a dearth of characters in it who were already blind. In reality, wouldn't there be a shift in power favoring those who are already blind and had developed survival skills over their formerly sighted counterparts who had not? The only such character in the movie is portrayed as a crude villain whose only moment of possible redemption comes when Moore tells him about the murder of one of the women and he's suddenly silent with shame. For about five seconds and it's to Chaykin's credit that these five seconds are as powerful as they are.

The film ultimately shifts away from its prison dynamic, into what's left of the outside world and it seems like the plot is less structured as the lens pull away from the microcism where they'd been focused and the ending of the film is somewhat ambiguous. Part of me really expected some scientists to come out from behind a curtain at some point and announce that the blindness wasn't real but some sort of social psychology experiment. The film ended, but not like that.

Blindness was adapted from a novel by a Portuguese writer, José Saramago who won the Nobel Prize and directed by Academy Award winning Brazilian director Fernando Meirelles. Meirelles does a skillful job but despite all this, it's really hard to come away from this film liking it. There's elements that are there to appreciate but the violence of the film seems at some points disturbing for the point of being disturbing rather than trying to portray mankind's tendency to descend into a darkness outside of blindness when thrown into chaotic circumstances.

The acting was outstanding by just about everyone and in many cases, that alone can salvage a film. Not quite in this case, but there was some amazing turns by actors who I didn't know but will definitely watch in the future. The credits said that the film was narrated by Glover, curious in a film mostly told from Moore's point of view but either it got edited out or I missed it.

This film had its moments where it was definitely watchable, even engrossing but not really enough to overcome the large amount of violence, some of which bordered on the misogynist.

Recommended: No

Movie Mood: Serious Movie
Viewing Method: Other
Film Completeness: Looked complete to me.
Worst Part of this Film: Script