Oct 2, 2008 12:29 pm US/Eastern
'Blindness'
NEW YORK (AP) ―
The blind literally lead the blind -- to hell and back -- in this pretentious, preposterous allegory.
An unnamed disease afflicts the unnamed citizens of an unnamed city, all of which is too precious. The victims are left sightless but they see white instead of black, a sensation one character compares to "swimming in milk."
Once they're rounded up by soldiers and quarantined in a grubby, abandoned mental asylum, their worst primal instincts emerge: urination and defecation in the hallways, theft, assaults and, ultimately, rape.
The physical and moral deterioration calls to mind the situation in the Superdome after Hurricane Katrina, but director Fernando Meirelles, in adapting a novel by Nobel Prize-winner Jose Saramago, is clearly trying to suggest that society similarly could collapse anywhere, anytime.
Rather than being thought-provoking, though, the whole dreary exercise feels like an overlong beat-down -- as if we're being scolded just for showing up. Even Julianne Moore can't liven up this slog, despite a typically strong performance as the one person who can still see (which is never explained, probably because it's an arbitrary plot device).
She pretends she's blind, though, to stay with her husband (Mark Ruffalo), who is an eye doctor. Other victims include a little boy, a hooker with a heart of gold (Alice Braga) and an elderly man (Danny Glover), all of whom were the doctor's patients, and a bartender (Gael Garcia Bernal) at the hotel where the prostitute worked.
R for violence including sexual assaults, language and sexuality/nudity. 121 min. One and a half stars out of four.
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