Blindness is a movie that has a good message, good actors, and a good director... yet something seems to be missing. Try as I may, it is very hard to put my finger on what that is, precisely, so let’s try and do that together.

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The basic premise of the film is fairly straightforward. There is an infectious disease which unexplainably and suddenly makes people go completely blind. Due to a sort of panic overtaking the world concerning the epidemic, the infected are hastily quarantined under terrible conditions. In this closed setting, deprived of sight, many of the people begin descending into animalistic impulses of violence and sex. The main characters are the Doctor (Mark Ruffalo) and his Wife (Julianne Moore), who was quarantined despite the fact that she can see. They come up as leaders in the blind community, and attempt to bring some sanity into the situation.

The majority of the acting in the film is very competent. Mark Ruffalo’s performance is fairly simple, yet is executed without a flaw. It is Julianne Moore, however, who is the true star of the picture. Her character being the only one who is capable of sight for the majority of the film, she is at the center of most action. The metaphor of the blindness is fairly obvious – she is also the one who is the most clear headed, the most morally aware and centered. The role is a demanding one, and Julianne Moore comes through with the amount of simultaneous warmness and detachment that her character requires.

The Brazilian director Fernardo Meirelles (The Constant Gardener) shows his exemplary directing skills off many times during the movie. One of the major examples of this is the use of sound. In a movie where most characters are blind, it is important for the audience to understand how it is at all conceivable that they would get around. The accentuation of sound serves us well in that regard. This being said, however, the visual metaphors of blindness are, in my opinion, significantly overused. There is hardly a scene in the film which does not end with a fade to a blinding white, and it is perhaps this that is the one thing that disrupted my viewing somewhat. The filmmakers take special care to make sure we realize our own mistakes, and to show us that we are the ones who are blind. However, the intelligent viewer will understand the main message of the film fairly early, and subsequent insistence on teaching us comes off as unnecessarily preachy and over the top. |