Posted on Thu, Oct. 2, 2008
Yes, there's a Julianne Moore Moment in Blindness. You know, the requisite scene in which the actress' face stretches to its high-cheekboned limits in a look of utter anguish, the tears streaming, the teeth clenched, chin atwitter. (Assignment to Final Cut Studio users: Assemble a montage of Moore Moments, from Children of Men, Freedomland, Magnolia, et cetera, et cetera.)
And why not? If you were Moore's nameless wife in Fernando Meirelles' hopelessly arty apocalyptic parable, you'd be in the throes of agony, too. Abruptly, inexplicably, in an unnamed city, the population is turning blind. The government proclaims a "state of crisis," and the afflicted, their vision gone, save for seeing a skein of whiteness, are quarantined in rundown, prisonlike barracks. The food is tossed to them by jittery guards, like zookeepers throwing meat at beasts in a cage.
Panic spreads along with the contagion, and since Blindness is populated by types, not people - no one has a name, and everyone identifies themselves by their occupation ("pharmacist's assistant," "hotel maid," "accountant") - it isn't difficult to draw analogies: Katrina, the Wall Street meltdown, pick your epic calamity.
Irony of ironies, Moore's husband (Mark Ruffalo) is an ophthalmologist - he goes blind not long after a distraught Japanese patient, struck by sudden sightlessness, comes in for help.
In many ways, Blindness is remindful of last year's cheesy sci-fi hit The Mist, in which smalltowners get trapped in a supermarket as a menacing cloud descends, triggering fear and ignoble behavior. If Stephen King had grown up French, reading Sartre, he could have written Blindness.
Murky and grainy, and showing human beings at their grimmest - thievery, rape, betrayal, murder - Blindness is no barrel of laughs. But it is a barrel of pretentious metaphorical musings. And it serves the picture no good whatsover that the cast (with a key exception) has to stagger around pretending not to see. Acting is all about making contact, imbuing characters with life. That's not easy when the dialogue is flat and generic, and the performers, by necessity of the plot, can't look one another in the eye. - Steven Rea
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