2008 Woodie Awards
Meirelles's Blindness not so visionary
Issue date: 10/9/08
Americans have come to expect a thing or two from their apocalyptic films. There is some catastrophe, or the threat of one. The world descends into madness. An unlikely hero emerges, leading the world - or a band of his close compatriots - through the hardship. Eventually, some sort of epic task is completed, the hero discovers something, or the events are reversed by an act of God. We end the movie with an uplifting look into the future, where everything will be just as peachy as it was in 1998.
Blindness, despite its strong literary roots, an excellent cast, intense imagery and compelling individual scenes, incredibly ends up delivering this cookie-cutter formula.
Blindness opens with the unnamed First Blind Man (Yusuke Iseya) suddenly losing his vision while stopped at a red light. The disease is highly contagious, spreading quickly to whomever he comes in contact with.
The man ends up in a quarantine ward, along with his wife, his ophthalmologist (Mark Ruffalo), and the doctor's wife (Julianne Moore). For some unknown reason, the doctor's wife does not contract the disease, and only pretends to be blind so that she can help her husband.
The ward is dark, poorly supplied and disgusting. It paints the human propensity toward descent into anarchy a little too well. Perhaps a couple of hundred people suddenly stricken blind really would end up in squalor. But the movie goes so far, so fast that it leaves us with some doubt.
Would Gael Garcia Bernal's character, King of Ward 3, really commandeer all the food from the rest of the wards? Would the entire Ward 3 rape the hospital's women, their sole option if they desire to feed their families? This mass rape was by far the most disturbing scene of the film, sending some in the audience toward the exit. Stomach-churners also included people dying horribly in a fire and excrement lining the hallways.
Would not the doctor's wife, the proverbial one-eyed woman among the blind, use her sight to dethrone the King? And where in the world did he get that gun and dozens of bullets?
Blindness, despite its strong literary roots, an excellent cast, intense imagery and compelling individual scenes, incredibly ends up delivering this cookie-cutter formula.
Blindness opens with the unnamed First Blind Man (Yusuke Iseya) suddenly losing his vision while stopped at a red light. The disease is highly contagious, spreading quickly to whomever he comes in contact with.
The man ends up in a quarantine ward, along with his wife, his ophthalmologist (Mark Ruffalo), and the doctor's wife (Julianne Moore). For some unknown reason, the doctor's wife does not contract the disease, and only pretends to be blind so that she can help her husband.
The ward is dark, poorly supplied and disgusting. It paints the human propensity toward descent into anarchy a little too well. Perhaps a couple of hundred people suddenly stricken blind really would end up in squalor. But the movie goes so far, so fast that it leaves us with some doubt.
Would Gael Garcia Bernal's character, King of Ward 3, really commandeer all the food from the rest of the wards? Would the entire Ward 3 rape the hospital's women, their sole option if they desire to feed their families? This mass rape was by far the most disturbing scene of the film, sending some in the audience toward the exit. Stomach-churners also included people dying horribly in a fire and excrement lining the hallways.
Would not the doctor's wife, the proverbial one-eyed woman among the blind, use her sight to dethrone the King? And where in the world did he get that gun and dozens of bullets?
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