|
|
Movie Review: Blindness
‘Blindness’ sees no entertainment
By Patrick Rills
Special to 2theadvocate.com
|
PLAY OFFICIAL TRAILER
out of 4 stars.
“Blindness” is a simple story smothered by a complicated film. Though deeply thought-provoking, it tries too hard to say too much, resulting in a film that is more convoluted than entertaining.
A city is ravaged by an epidemic of blindness, causing the infected to be forcefully quarantined by a nameless government. While in captivity, conditions turn chaotic in the makeshift hospital/prison when patients lose all morality, dignity and compassion as they are cut off from the outside world and left to fight over depleting food rations.
Julianne Moore plays the wife of an infected optometrist (Mark Ruffalo) who is inexplicably immune to the disease and is the only person in the facility who can still see. As the situation becomes dire, Moore leads her faction against the food-hoarding thugs who have imposed their own brand of tyranny and oppression upon the other prisoners.
“Blindness” is as carefully constructed as director Fernando Meirelles’s previous works, “City of God” and “The Constant Gardener.” It is beautifully photographed but with almost unbearably tedious editing that is absent from the aforementioned films but rampant in “Blindness.” Meirelles could have easily shaved 30 minutes from the film and no one would have objected.
Found at the core of “Blindness” is not story, but a meticulous study of how individuals facing great stress interact in a lawless society creating a sort of reinvented “Lord of the Flies” mixed with “28 Days Later” for a more modern flavor. Loyalties and convictions are pushed to their limits, and the film does not shy away from shocking images depicting what helpless, starving people will resort to for survival.
There really isn’t any room for a story to surface in between over stylized effects and pointless “mood-setting” close ups. It doesn’t take that many disgusting shots of a bathroom used by blind people to drive home the point that this place isn’t the Hilton.
“Blindness” is a popcorn blockbuster wrapped in an art film. Though its story is utterly nonexistent, it at least has the appearance and execution of a great film. However, its slow pacing and overworked aesthetics just drag out a nervous feeling that makes it seem like watching surgery instead of a movie.
