Film Review

Title: Blindness

Principle Actors: Mark Ruffalo, Julianne Moore, Danny Glover

Director: Fernando Meirelles

Studio: Alliance Films

Release Date: Oct. 3^rd 2008

Running Time: 120 Minutes

Audience Suitability: PG

Reviewed By: Robert Waldman (Vancouver Correspondent – Canada)

Desperate times bring out the best in people – or the worst.  For some reasons film festival programmers have gone ape over Blindness, a somber tale from Alliance Films.  In Blindness, we have a very gut-wrenching tale of some mystery illness affecting a population.

Somber is definitely the tone set in this eye-popping odyssey well delivered by director Fernando Meirelles (The Constant Gardener).  Right from the get go you know you are in for a decidedly different movie, as one by one, parts of a cosmopolitan population get infected by something unusual. While we may have seen this sort of story as in this year’s less than scintillating The Event here we do sense a real ominous danger. 

The one common denominator wrecking havoc on this metropolitan population is the condition of blindness.  Most of us know the value of sight and dread even the remotest possibility of losing vision.  Trouble big time occurs in this city as one by one this infectious condition spreads.  So worried are the authorities and the powers that be that they decide to “quarantine” all those infected.

Onlookers will care for the plight of a doctor and his wife who wind up inside this caged hellhole.  Cut off from the outside by less than friendly guards this pair try to maneuver their way through the mess and mind games and dire straight set in.  Both Julianne Moore (Hannibal) and Mark Ruffalo (Zodiac) are thoroughly convincing as the couple who take it onto themselves to try to “manage” what clearly is an intolerable situation.  Man’s inhumanity to man comes to the foreground as dark forces inside these cloistered walls strip whatever pretense of dignity remained.

Stark images of brutality and a sense of hope make Blindness a sad commentary on desperate people and a society that simply doesn’t seem to care.  Gutsy performances push through the sometimes muddled script and the many hard to see night time shots that take away from the film’s impact.

During those 120 minutes you will feel at times uncomfortable and awkward sitting through the indignities that pollute the atmosphere of a jailed population whose only crime was to have caught a mystery bug.  Let’s hope none of us sink to the depths these down on their luck folks resort to in this human jungle.