A bright white light blinds a guy in his car. Then the First Blind Man (Iseya) is driven home by someone who's supposed to be helping him (McKellar) but ends up stealing the blind man's car. The blind man's wife (Kimura) takes her husband to a specialist (Ruffalo), and they sit in a waiting room with others who have eye problems, including the Woman With Dark Glasses (Braga), the Man with a Black Eye Patch (Glover) and a Boy (Nye).
The minister of health (Oh) decides to quarantine all those infected, but at the last minute the Doctor's Wife hops in the car and feigns blindness in order to be with her husband. One by one the others are led into the quarantined facility, which comes to resemble a concentration camp for survival.
When the number of those infected with blindness reaches into the hundreds, one renegade declares himself King of Ward Three (Bernal), and his henchman (Chaykin) is a guy who was already blind in the outside world and got swept up in the frenzy but can easily get around among the newly blind. When the King smuggles in a gun, the Ward Three gang confiscate all the food rations coming into the quarantined area and make the others pay for their food with whatever jewels or valuables they have been able to bring. Eventually that too runs out. The outside world, so it seems, has forgotten the quarantined people, and they run out of things to bargain with, so things start to get really ugly.
The idea of following the sole sighted person through a sea of blindness isn't a very subtle metaphor, and certainly it is clear from the outset where it is going. Kudos to Meirelles and screenwriter McKellar for tackling a difficult novel and setting it in a timeless, faceless city that will make this an appropriately timeless cautionary tale.
The cast is incredible in every scene, particularly those in small roles, like Nye as the Boy, who gets trapped without his parents, and Braga as the woman who takes the kid under her wing but has a history as a prostitute. Bernal is particularly heartless in Blindness as the King who finds a taste of power in an uncomfortable setting and takes full advantage of his situation.
The director paints an overall sense of dread through camera techniques that make the scenes blindingly white rather than dark. The opening scene shows closeups of red and green streetlights blinking, like giant eyeballs, just before the first guy is stricken while driving.
No character is predictable in Blindness, and every character is disturbing, but none so much as the Doctor and his Wife. Ruffalo begins in Blindness being arrogant and condescending to his wife, who tries to understand her husband's concern about his blind patient by making him some homemade tiramisu. Moore changes from an obedient sidekick to a leader while emasculating her husband along the way.
Blindness is shocking and smart, but it bangs you over the head with its messages, and it lacks any sort of subtlety, even though the outcome remains somewhat inconclusive. But if the camera closes in on a pair of scissors hanging from a nail, or a bowl of oranges sitting in a bowl, be very aware that those elements will play a part somehow in another part of the film.
Blindness is quite a disturbing and thought-provoking story, but I was more a fan of the director's friend Alfonso Cuaron's Children of Men.
-Mike
