Blindness

Directed by: Fernando Meirelles
Written by: Don McKellar

If there’s anything I did not expect from renting Blindness, it’s that I would still be thinking of the film months later. Although at the Toronto International Film Festival in 2008 (an event I frequent and have a bit of an obsession with), I didn’t manage to get to a screening of the movie. The film is filmmaker Fernando Meirelles’ second English-language film, and stars the engaging Julianne Moore and stellar actor Mark Ruffalo.

One of the biggest reasons I think I was so enveloped in this movie is because of the concept. The movie centers on a worldwide epidemic where victims go completely blind and you never find out why. The film is an adaptation of the novel by Jose Saramago – and though I wasn’t sure of my initial reaction to it, I now believe it is one of the most heart wrenching, brutally eye-opening films I’ve seen – ever. Of course the beginning unveils the disease as sporadic, a random collection of characters in an unnamed city go blind, and soon the blind are shipped off to a crumbling mental facility, where the ultimate unravelling of human decency begins. Moore plays Ruffalo’s wife, and pretends to be blind so she can accompany him to the facility, where she becomes an unwilling hero to hundreds of people with no companions. Without going in to too much detail, the regression of basic human rights turns women into currency, and murder into a commonplace affair. Although the facility is visually disgusting, as you watch the characters suffer there are fleeting moments of togetherness and normalcy that can bring on a sense of hope in what are most certainly times of despair for the “inmates” of the facility - who are at some point labelled as having “the white blindness”.

The movie is at times unforgiving and brutal on the eyes, and audiences I’m sure have cringed in the thousands. But it’s worth the two hours to learn how resilient humans can be – Blindness is a true story of flawed humanity speckled with a little hope.

Add to: del.icio.us | Digg | NewsVine | Mixx | FaceBook | Twitter