At times, however, that ruthlessness can get to be a bit much. It follows the lives of several individuals whom are nameless to us -- an optometrist (Mark Ruffalo, Zodiac), a sunglass-wearing prostitute (Alice Braga, I Am Legend) and the boy she's caring for, a weathered one-eyed man (Danny Glover, Lethal Weapon), a thief (Don McKellar,eXistenZ) and many others -- as they suffer from a condition that sends them into a state of disorienting blindness. It's not darkness, however, but a condition called the "white sickness", one that first falls on the eyes of a helpless man (Yusuke Iseya, Sukiyaki Western Django) as he's driving his car. As the unexplainable, prematurely-diagnosed epidemic begins to spread, the government jams each and every infected individual into a forgotten, dingy quarantine that's weak on supplies and maintenance. They're left to fend for themselves, only given a sparse supply of goods that they must divvy up within a self-governed environment, one that quickly transcends into depressing, animalistic chaos -- all photographed in shaky-cam, high-contrast grime by Meirelles' outstanding cinematographer, César Charlone.
There's one catch; one woman, the optometrist's wife (Julianne Moore, Children of Men), isn't blind, though she allows most of the policing soldiers and infected people to believe her to be so. She's the eyes and ears in Blindness, and what she witnesses is, needless to say, graphic; without any governing bodies, social stature, or presence of hope in this claustrophobic environment, it rapidly transforms into an adult-based, violent "Lord of the Flies" nightmare for the blind. Hedonism ensues, leading to random sexual encounters between filthy people who can only size their partners up by voice, scent, and the way their bodies feel. More importantly, desperation also floods the grimy quarantine ward, leading to fluctuating dominance structures that gauge purely on whoever is more aggressive or aggravated at the time. It all becomes a matter of primal indulgence and survival within the erratic box of a setting, one that quickly pivots once a bartender (Gael Garcia Bernal, Science of Sleep) -- somebody who has seen the sighted world's ugliness and self-absorbance -- shifts matters from bad to worse as he gathers a thuggish mob within his corner of the ward.
Fernando Meirelles aims to construct a scorn-filled environment in Blindness that's as hostile as possible, one that uses a lack of vision as a teardown of all but rudimentary structure. If nobody can see the color of one's skin or the clothing they wear, why succomb to basing judgment, right? As harsh as that concept sounds, that's actually the only truth that these people grasp in their world of blistering light. They stop caring about everything except the bare necessities of life, relegating them to a sea of starved, horny depressants that follow hand-in-hand to use the bathroom and shower themselves. Whether the portrayal is accurate or not is debatable, but the indie film director still presents us with a surprisingly vivid and frightening dystopia that allows no evidence of the outside world's existence to be seen -- excluding the word's steady stream of newly-blinded denizens. It becomes an allegory on this stilted paradigm that humanity has adopted, one that emphasizes physical projection as a measure of our internal self -- and a lack of it being a sort of strange freedom.The fact that most of the focal characters get lost in Blindness' sea of grayed matter doesn't help to support the film, as the few identifiable people within the white blur are a mixed bag of partially-realized archetypes. Some exist on fairly tangible levels, like Mark Ruffalo's optometrist and Yusuke Iseya and Yoshina Kimura's combined strength as the "first" blind people, while others do more to rough up the sandpaper-like smoothness, such as Garcia-Bernal's weak turn as the hot-blooded anarchist. The only fully-competent and impressive outing comes from Julianne Moore, who gives us one lump of pulsating, throbbing muscle to hold onto as the scattered hopefulness in the story quickly washes down the drains. But it's not successful as a character film, partially because it operates so heavily around the dynamic of lost humanity and temperament -- which makes for an intriguing, yet troubling, portrait with very few identifiable entities.
Though Meirelles presents the material well, it suffers from one intentional problem: it spends too much time emphasizing the dirty, painful nature of the sightless ward's self-imposed ugliness to allow for Blindness' rays of distinct warmth to actually shine. There are some, mind you, especially once the film crawls towards a theme-based conclusion rife with double-meanings and theological contemplations, but you're got to brush off several layers of disheartening muck to reach them. Instead, it focuses on the single-toned dynamic that revolves around blindness becoming a gateway to self-sufficing desperation, a discomforting element further emphasized by an already-blind person's participation in the seedier corners of the ward's anarchistic stature -- something that speaks low for the gaunt humanity present in the film. Just as pitch-black as Battle Royale and A Clockwork Orange regarding the bitterness of dark humor and hedonistic whims, Blindness enters into a labyrinth of brash and filthy societal teardowns and stay lost in there for a very long time. Fernando Meirelles' complex adaptation is captivating and unsettling, but it's difficult to offer gratitude for its excessively bleak efforts.
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