A Movie with a View

It seems that almost every fall, I find myself championing a film almost no one else likes. In 2006, it was Keeping Mum; last year, it was Things We Lost in the Fire. This time, it's Blindness. Is this a difficult movie? Yes. Would I watch it again. No time soon. It sat with me for hours, though, in a way nothing has in some time, and it showed me yet another facet of the awesome Julianne Moore.

As the sole sighted person in a quarantined area for the blind, Julianne Moore embodies the true woman warrior in Fernando Meirelles’ Blindness, based on the allegorical novel by Jose Saramago. She doesn’t play a Xena or a G.I. Jane; rather, she fights for a sense of decency and kinship in the midst of depravity. Her character, a doctor’s wife, helps everyone, including the audience, survive this challenging but ultimately rewarding movie.

An epidemic of blindness breaks out in an unidentified city (a digital composite of locations in Ontario, Uruguay and Brazil), its beginnings described by its first victim (Yusuke Iseya) as “light shining through a sea of white … like I’m swimming in milk.” An ophthalmologist (Mark Ruffalo) unwittingly spreads it, though – for reasons unexplained by the characters and the filmmakers – not to his wife (Moore). The blind are sent to government hospitals that resemble barracks, Moore’s character feigns a loss of sight to be with her husband, and order breaks down. For the doctor’s wife, bearing witness to the atrocities may be worse than having no vision at all.

Meirelles previously directed the Brazilian slum drama City of God and the Kenyan-set socially tinged thriller The Constant Gardener, so he knows how to illustrate the worst of the human condition. In Blindness, the wards evoke a bleached-out Third World bomb shelter, with feces and waste piling up and unkempt residents slumped on beds. (Kudos to Tule Peake’s production-design team.) The guards outside provide no aid, their vocals muffled to emphasize the physical and emotional distance. Saramago wrote Blindness a decade ago, yet it’s impossible not to watch the adaptation and think of the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in 2005.

While Meirelles relies too much on white-flash and blurry techniques of filming, he does capture one of the overlooked effects of blindness: a sharper sense of sound. The noises are very acute, very crystallized, because a blind person would be hyperaware of voices, as the King of Ward 3 (Gael Garcia Bernal) proves.

That “king” and his companions lead to one of Blindness’ most vile sequences, the orgy rape of the women in Ward One in exchange for food. (Here, the soldier atrocities of the wars in the former Yugoslavia come to mind.) Meirelles shoots this as a darkened tangle of bodies, as tastefully as one possibly can film such an event. That doesn’t diminish from the disgusting nature of the act.

The women could remain victims, mute and broken, and this would be an understandable reaction. Instead, the doctor’s wife sees this as a time to take action, to break the cycle, and she rallies her community and the film. Moore’s simple, dignified performance carries Blindness even through its darkest, most uncomfortable moments.

Thanks to the power of a woman, Blindness ends at a most unexpected place: hope.