Review: Blindness

While waiting at a stoplight, a man is inexplicably stricken blind. In hours, his mysterious affliction has begun to spread through the populace.

This is the premise of Fernando Meirelles's Blindness. It's a brilliant idea that plays to America's current apocalyptic atmosphere, but this film doesn't do justice to it.

The trouble is, almost nothing unexpected occurs during the film. Given what you now know of the story's premise, I think you can guess with a high degree of accuracy how it unfolds.

The blinding disease sweeps across the nation, and a sinister government agency - one of the most shamefully generic sinister government agencies ever presented on screen, I might add - rounds up those infected and throws them into a quarantined compound.

Now in isolation and struggling with their sightlessness, our protagonists form a rudimentary cooperative society. The leaders - a good-hearted ophthalmologist (Mark Ruffalo) and his wife (Julianne Moore), who is immune to the disease - differentiate themselves from the others. They make strides, but, of course, it isn't long before conflict arises, driven by a puckish megalomaniac (Gael García Bernal), and things start to go all Lord of the Flies.

Meirelles's camera avoids either sentimentality or sadism. We view the characters from a distance and, especially in the beginning, they appear like paramecia bumping inside a Petri dish.

This is a refreshing break from the heapings of schmaltz that typically accompany doomsday movies, but as a result the characters don't engage adequately when the movie's scope narrows down to the quarantined facility.

Consequently, the film's two hours feel like a two-hour block of a calculus lecture, and even in moments of theoretical exhilaration, the mood weighs like a ton of bricks.

The sound design and cinematography are frequently good, and Ruffalo, who wore vision-obscuring contact lenses during shooting, proves that his great performance in Zodiac was no accident.

It's also interesting to watch the doe-eyed Gael García Bernal in an atypically villainous role.

However, this isn't enough to save Blindness from its lack of inventiveness and leaden pacing. Watch The Day of the Triffids instead.