Blindness
by Fernando Meirelles
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DVD details
Actor: Danny Glover, Don McKellar, Julianne Moore, Maury Chaykin, Sandra OhDirector: Fernando Meirelles
Brand: Buena Vista Home Video
DVD: Region Code 1
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Subtitled); Spanish (Subtitled); English (Original Language)
Format: AC-3, Color, Dolby, DVD, NTSC, Subtitled, Widescreen
Picture Format: 1.85:1
Running Time: 120 minutes
Published: 2009-02-01
DVD Release Date: 2009-02-10
Audience Rating: R (Restricted)
Studio: MIRAMAX
Product features:
- TESTED
DVD Reviews of Blindness
DVD Review: Dismal and Bleak
Summary: 2 Stars
Blindness / B001LLH8SE
*Spoilers*
When a mysterious epidemic of unusual blindness begins spreading throughout the human population, the government response is swift: the infected are thrown into quarantine to fend for themselves until either a cure is found, or the infected die. One of the infected is accompanied by his wife, who is (unbeknownst to everyone but her husband) immune to this strange disease. She alone can see in the new community that awaits her.
This premise is a bit odd, but I am willing to accept it for the sake of the "point" of the film, which is how society might potentially break down in the face of widespread trauma and lack of governmental controls. Having said that, I do find it patently ridiculous that the blind are just tossed into an empty building to fend for themselves. I would expect at the very *least* for there to be closed circuit television and communication devices between the scientists and doctors on one side and the blind and infected on the other. If not for mercy, then in order to study the effects of the illness. How do the scientists hope to determine a cure when they have no way to interact with the infected: no blood samples, no behavioral information, and nobody to run tests on? So this particular angle - that the infected are all on their own from the get-go - is ridiculous. But, like I said, I'm willing to accept it in order to move the premise forward.
At first, the blind adapt as well as can be expected. Quarantine is stressful under the best of conditions, but especially when suddenly handicapped in such a way that they can no longer care for themselves in the manner they have been used to - even such a task as locating and using the restrooms now requires whole new senses to rely on. Add on top of this a good dose of trauma, coupled with complete isolation from the outside world, and terror that if they stray to close to the border fence they will be shot instantly, and you can imagine that the overall mood is grim. As the wards fill up, the malcontents gravitate to one another, eventually setting up a territorial monarchy, monopolizing the food supplies, and demanding "payment" from the other groups in exchange for food. The malcontents are aided in this task by the implausible-yet-valuable addition of a gun and a sharp hunting knife (why the prisoners weren't searched initially is problematic, but even more so is why the violent and psychotic gun-owner didn't attempt to shoot the medical staff when they came to drag him away), as well as the addition of a blind-from-birth man who was picked up by accident in the general hysteria surrounding the disease. The blind-from-birth gentleman is soft-spoken and appears to be generally kind, but he has no apparent qualms about helping to rob and rape the ward population.
Thereafter follows an extremely disturbing and graphic rape sequence which I would definitely recommend viewing if trying to understand the dynamics of power imbalance in gender relations (the 'good' men deride the women for refusing to volunteer; the women reasonably ask why the men aren't volunteering to go themselves; the 'good' men protest that is *different* and this is 'no big deal' because, hey, it's "just" sex, right?) and which I would definitely *not* recommend viewing if you are just looking for a nice, quiet Friday night movie.
The woman are brutalized and beaten, and one woman is killed in the process, whilst the 'good' men back in the ward continue to fail to understand what has happened. When the prisoners finally flee the ward, they find that the guards are away from their posts and the whole world is infected with blindness. They stumble hopelessly forward, seeking survival in the ravaged supermarkets, hoping to avoid being victimized by the other victims, and praying that the wild dogs in the streets don't eat them. Our immune heroine steers a small group of survivors to her old home, where she nurtures them to health, and tries to cope with her own feelings of being the constant nursemaid to hundreds of helpless, traumatized people, and presumably her feelings regarding her husband's infidelity, her own rape, and her murder of one of the inmates. (I say "presumably" because these events are not revisited, and I can only assume that the heroine is coping with them.) The movie ends with the "Ground Zero" patient regaining his sight as mysteriously as he lost it, and the implication that, as he goes, so does the rest of the world.
"Blindness" is deep and thought-provoking, and the premise is certainly interesting, if not new: that, in the absence of societal controls and in the face of extreme trauma, we'll basically be reduced to murderous, rapacious, Thunderdome inhabitants. While I am essentially sympathetic to this viewpoint and I am not ignorant of, say, the Stanford Prison Experiment, at the same time I am skeptical of the way the movie had to be set up "just so" in order to obtain this effect.
In order to obtain this "just so" effect, for instance, the `bad' elements of society are given a huge edge - deadly weapons and a blind-from-birth man who can be their `eyes' when the rest of the prisoners are still struggling to adapt. The `good' prisoners are handicapped by being in a closed space - they cannot simply leave or flee. That's quite a bonus on the side of evil and quite a handicap on the side of good, and the artificiality of the situation undermines the premise somewhat. Consider also that it is never resolved why the victims are so very passive in their fate. We have no concrete numbers, but we can estimate that the 'bad' group has approximately 20 men versus multiple wards of 35-40 people each. The 'bad' group is able to monopolize the food supply...how? By showing up and grabbing all the boxes whilst waving a pistol around, apparently. But this tactic really only works for so long against desperate, starving, traumatized people who in many cases no longer care if they live or die and likely have a great deal of unexpressed rage to work out against this world-which-blinded-them in general and their tormentors in particular - especially when the dictator has a limited number of bullets and a very low chance of hitting *you*, personally. We just have to accept, however, that they can and do monopolize the food with an iron grip, in order to proceed to the "inevitable" raping and killing of the women. This just feels terribly artificial, and the whole reason of the movie breaks down.
In the end, I am willing to concede that if society breaks down it is possible that a few violent overlords may terrorize the rest of us, but I don't feel that this movie demonstrates that dynamic so much as it demonstrates that when strict, unrealistic controls are imposed on a world, it will respond in the one direction the writers left available. I think, perhaps, it might have been more interesting to explore this concept within a more realistic framework (such as if everyone went blind at the same time), but I suspect that in the absence of forced enclosure to consolidate the bad elements and provide them with unlimited power, the terrorization would be less possible and the 'good' people would more likely win the day. But I'm an optimist.
This movie provides captions for the hearing impaired.
~ Ana Mardoll
Description of Blindness
BLINDNESS - DVD MovieBased on José Saramago's allegorical novel, Blindness is a haunting film that works like an unusual fusion of fable and gritty suspense. Julianne Moore and Mark Ruffalo star as an unnamed, married couple living in an unidentified city where a mass epidemic of blindness hits. Ruffalo's character, a doctor, is affected, but Moore's is not. When the two are transferred to a government-run quarantine facility complete with armed guards, they soon find themselves in a rapidly deteriorating situation. Criminals take over food distribution and extort possessions and sex from the innocent. Sanitation becomes a thing of the past. More subtly, rules that might govern one's judgement and behavior on an everyday basis simply vanish, and personal and collective values rewrite themselves. Moore's character hides the fact that she can see (except from her spouse), and thus becomes the audience's surrogate in the thick of so much misery. She also becomes an avenging angel at exactly the right time, and then a matriarch when the action shifts from the quarantine hell to the city's streets. The latter part of Blindness finds a handful of the inmates (played by Danny Glover and Alice Braga, among others) joining Moore and Ruffalo in a kind of post-apocalypse oasis, a chapter as touching as the previous chapters were nightmarish.
Director Fernando Meirelles deftly captures the film's spirit of mixed parable and horror, grounding the action but at the same time encouraging a viewer not to take it too literally. He honors Saramago's creative depiction of blindness not as a field of black but, in this case, as an ocean of white. He also does some tricky, disorienting things with the camera, shooting at odd angles, putting his frame around strange details in a scene--all of it has a way of giving a viewer a feeling of what it's like to perceive the world in a whole new way. --Tom Keogh
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