Blindness

7. Blindness
Roger Ebert hated this film because it was so jarring to watch and he's completely right. It is jarring because Meirelles is trying to simulate the titular condition that afflicts all but one of the people in the film. Simply, a dude comes down with unexplainable blindness and it spreads to every person with whom he comes into contact: all but one woman. Basically it's allegorical of the phenomenon of moral blindness and, to an extent, the kind of group think that went on in Facist Europe in the 30s and 40s. It's idealistic and a bit naive at points, but overall it's probably an apt allegory. If you're looking for that kind of thing, though, you'd be better off renting The Ox-Bow Incident or Fury or Bad Day at Black Rock, all fantastic films that are much better and much less convoluted. In fact, that's exactly the problem with Blindness: it makes difficult a concept that has been done simpler and better...decades before! It may not be fair to compare this contemporay film with the three that I've mentioned, but it's also impossible to not compare them. In the shadow of those films, this one seems like a monumental waste of time (not to mention a step back from the vaunted pedestal that Fernando Meirelles had been standing on after City of God and The Constant Gardener). The fact of the matter is that Meirelles gives us the best he can based on the source material. After the characters are rendered sightless, their actions are one-dimensional and only serve to move the plot. Every bad thing that happens is so convenient! This film seems so...inorganic. So artificial. And that's all that Blindness is: artiface. Meirelles and, by proxy, Saramago use poorly-crafted plot devices and convenient characterization to pull the wool over our eyes, so we don't see how shallow this film really is.
Grade: D (put those other three movies on your netflix queue)