Julianne Moore Movie:

				Label: Miramax Salesrank:
		MPAA Rating: Media: Theatrical Release

Blindness [Theatrical Release] Reviews:
BLINDNESS: "The Plague" Meets "Day of the Triffids"
2008-10-06 - The very first few minutes of BLINDNESS sets the theme and tone. A young Asian man is driving a car when for no apparent reason, he is struck blind, causing a huge traffic jam. For him the world descends not into inky blackness but into cottony whiteness. A samaritan offers to drive him home in the victim's car. Soon, the samaritan is seen to be a thief who promptly steals the car. What follows is less a plunge into a maelstrom of apocalyptic science fiction where rules and causes and effects hold sway but more into the murky realm of allegory where things are not what they seem. The whiteness of blindness is a recurring motife, with each victim infecting another until the entire city is rendered immobile. Is this whiteness the Eye of God expressing heavenly displeasure with humanity? Or is it merely a physical symptom of a disease not unlike AIDS? One of the first victims by happenstance is an opthalmologist who learns that his own eyes are in perfect working order. The cause then? Who knows but the film hints that Man himself is ultimately responsible for his own plight. BLINDNESS has a sense of claustrophobia to it. What begins on a broad city avenue is quickly reduced to a hospital ward where the crumbling City Fathers in a panic quarrantine all those infected. Julianne Moore is a wife who pretends blindness so she may accompany her husband Mark Ruffalo to one such a ward. Inside, the audience sees that humanity is divided into several discrete categories: the "good guys" like Moore and Ruffalo who seek only to re-establish some sense of social order and the "bad guys" who wish only to take advantage of the situation by demanding first money then sex from blind women. No one in the film has a name. They are known generically by their function. This lack of individuation lends the film to being seen under an allegorical light. In earlier films like THE PLAGUE, the disease was a metaphor for a hidden Nazism that emerges from the slime to catch unawares an entire city. Here, the plague of blindness is less focused as to cause. The intent of the film seems to be to recreate the eternal battle between anarchy and law. There are many scenes of graphic rape which invests BLINDNESS with a subtext that suggests that the bestiality of male predators lurks uncomfortably close to the skin. Watching the movie was for me an ordeal. It was unpleasant and odious, yet these qualities lay in the theme not the film. Thus, BLINDNESS is a marker in cinema that shouts out that our society is held together only with the loosest of threads and on the day that the City Fathers decide to deny humanity of one segment of the population by trying to save their own skins is the day that it will scarcely matter when or either whether a cure is found. BLINDNESS is a cold dunk into the pool of warmth that we take for granted.

Blindness is a Modern Masterpiece
2008-10-05 - Blindness is one of the best movies of the year. It is a TRIUMPH! Don't go in expecting a disaster movie - the movie was NOT about the Blindness, it was about HUMANITY.

Whiteness
2008-10-05 - Fernando Meirelles' "Blindness" begins with what I would call an urban nightmare: a young Asian man is in the middle of a horrid traffic jam in some unknown city and suddenly...he cannot see. He is blind for no specific reason one that neither he nor we can fathom. It is a nightmare, really: to be trapped behind the wheel of your car, other cars honking, people yelling obscenities and you in the middle of this without your strongest sense of sight.
A Good Samaritan steps up to drive the man (no one has a name in this film, btw) home, does so and proceeds to steal the car. Pretty much a normal scenario from Meirelles who always aims a microscope on all societies looking for what makes us tick as a people and as a government, what makes us act in the manner that we do and proceeds to judiciously eviscerate us, getting to our core as a society in the process: see his devastating "City of God" or the terrific "The Constant Gardener."
The biggest problem I think with "Blindness" is that, though it is at times thoughtful and heartfelt, it is simply too didactic to have any real kind of effect on us for two hours.
The Asian man is first then others, including a good ophthalmologist (played by Mark Ruffalo) go blind though his wife, a miraculous Julianne Moore doesn't.
Soon a "Big Brother" government (talking head on a huge screen reports the spread of the blindness) puts all of the blind into what looks like a deserted warehouse in which the various wards bond together and against the other wards.
"Blindness" recalls a number of films, "Lord of the Flies," "1984" for two as the denizens of the wards go about their business of scrounging for food, setting up hierarchies and merely trying to exist with a grain of respect: a measly respect that is soon degraded by greed and moral turpitude. Without the niceties of our home, of food, of work, these characters turn into something akin to one step about an animal.
In regards to the Julianne Moore character: it is never made clear why she does not become blind other than, we can fathom, as a plot device. She also only shares this with her husband and a few others. Perplexing.
Though Meirelles' direction here is a little detached there are some beautiful scenes that make us gasp at their tenderness and beauty: Julianne and a former prostitute acknowledging their common ground and Danny Glover's scene and a woman with whom he has become close. But there aren't enough of these scenes.
Much is made of the contrast between the "blackness" of normal blindness and the "whiteness" of the blindness of the characters of this movie but what does it mean? Is white blindness purer, closer to God? We never know.
"Blindness" is certainly beautiful to behold but the themes have been done many times before and though Meirelles is an important and talented director, this film is certainly a marginal though not a major success.