Monday, Oct. 06, 2008

Plot of 'Blindness' loses its focus

By Ed Robertson, atomictown.com

I know you can't tell this from my pretty pretty picture, but I wear contacts.

My eyes are so bad taking off my glasses is like instantly being on drugs. Lights look fuzzy and huge. People are mobile blurs. I crash into things and can't keep my mouth from hanging half open. Yep, being half blind is completely awesome.

Perhaps that's why I'm so cavalier about losing my sight. You'll never see me wearing goggles while swimming with the Amazonian Cornea-Eaters. When my BB gun jams, I stare straight down the barrel to find out what's up. Camping one time, I forgot my steel and had to scrape my flint directly across my pupils. The flint broke. Terrible vision has made me like a Superman who can barely tell day from night. Blindness posits that if we all went blind, civilization as we know it would fall apart, but you know what? I poked my eyes out right now, and I bet I finish typing this jsut fnie.

In the middle of traffic, a man suddenly goes blind. Optometrist Mark Ruffalo can find no cause or explanation, and shortly after treating him, Ruffalo goes blind, too.

He's not the only one. As the epidemic spreads, the government responds by quarantining the infected, hauling them off to unsupervised wards surrounded by armed guards. Ruffalo's hauled off, as is his wife Julianne Moore -- only Moore can still see.

Her sight comes in pretty handy when the quarantined are expected to govern themselves. It's even more useful once this order breaks down in the form of a self-proclaimed hospital king taking control of the food and declaring that, if everyone else wants to eat, they'll have to pay.

Like Lord of the Flies, but with adults who should know better, Blindness follows the collapse of both the makeshift society inside the quarantine walls and the wider one outside them, finding a grimy, ground-level realism. Normally apocalypse movies are peopled with savages who look like they spend their dull TV-free lives sleeping under mud blankets and stabbing each others' leather jackets with long-bladed knives, so it's a nice change of pace to see disaster survivors who, rather than looking stylishly dangerous, just look unwashed.

Also, in what's surely the most ironic thing since rain on your wedding day, Blindness looks great. With whitewashed cinematography and an eye for filth, dirt, and debris, director Fernando Meirelles creates a world that makes raw sewage even more beautiful than usual.

It's less brilliant in the story department. Seemingly unable to decide whether it's about the span of the infection, the afflicted's stay in quarantine, or the way an unstable society strains some relationships while strengthening others, the plot sometimes loses track of itself. Not enough to be boring or frustrating, but enough, sometimes, to wonder where all this is going.

The answer, it turns out, is barbarism. Brutal, not-wearing-clothes, let-your-waste-fall-where-it-may barbarism. Achieved through a gradual, understated progression, their slide is compelling right up to when the self-proclaimed king starts extorting them, at which point Moore, Ruffalo, and their civilized gang make the leap from simply being putrid and stinking to being putrid, stinking cowards.

I'm a man of monstrous peace, myself, and I'll shoot you through the neck if you ever say different, but there's a point at which you fight back. If my roommate steals my pudding from the fridge, he can expect to have his body stuffed in the freezer. When the king starts making his demands -- and remember, man of peace here -- I would be murdering people like an automated murder machine.

It's tough to argue what characters "should" have done in a given situation, but for a short stretch, the movie's realism gives way to "Now Suffer Some More, Jerks!" Syndrome, where bad things seem to be happening more for the sake of making the characters' lives hell than because they're the natural result of what's led up to them.

Only for a short stretch, though. Blindness isn't so much the sci-fi thriller of the trailers as it is a study in the ways people react to change and disaster. It's gorgeous and just well-observed enough to forgive it a few detours.

Grade: B-