Blindness
BY Ryan LaMarca / 2009-06-26
An epidemic of blindness is sweeping across the planet. Sounds like a good idea for a horror movie, right? No? How about a thriller? What about an allegorical social drama that attempts to study the nature of populations in crisis? Yeah, that's a good way to spend two hours of your time. The movie "Blindness" is an attempt to do such an experiment, but as boring and dull as clunky dramas masquerading as thrillers come, this is the mother of them all.
Explaining the plot of "Blindness" is almost a futile effort. Really, it can be summarized in one sentence by saying, "Blindness overtakes the city." There's more to it than that, but getting entangled in all of the characters becomes awfully confusing. To further add to my plight and frustration, the characters bear no names. The two main characters of the movie played by Mark Ruffalo and Julianne Moore are called "Doctor" and "Doctor's Wife" respectively. Danny Glover plays "Man with Black Eye Patch."
Blindness sweeps through the city, but Moore remains unaffected becoming the leader of the pack of blind people. However, her husband keeps this fact a secret as the world and everyone around them believes that everyone is being stricken by the "white blindness." More panic would ensue if word got out one person could still see. But even right now, trying to explain "Blindness" is almost too much. It's as if I just read a book I didn't understand, and now I need the Cliffs' Notes version. Thank goodness for Wikipedia.
The objective of "Blindness" is not all too different from that of another movie from 2008, "Funny Games." Both movies act as social experiments whose goal is to test the willpower of the audience. "Blindness," thankfully, is more reserved and more imaginative, but its end result is still entirely ineffective. The movie bears an overexposed look to it and a white covering pervades the screen during most of the film. In essence, "Blindness" attempts to make us feel blind.
Moreover, this is exactly what the movie wants to do. It wants to immerse us in the crumbling world created by "Blindness." But it's a world filled with characters constantly screaming at each other. Being that everyone is blind, who could blame them? But that's beside the point. Social experimentation does not necessarily translate well into good entertainment, and that is the biggest hindrance facing "Blindness."
Consequently, it's a long and boring movie, and the performances by Mark Ruffalo and Julianne Moore, no matter how good they are, offer no consolation for the overly long and protracted story. "Blindness," at its core is not a bad film, but rather a misguided effort. It seems more suited for a television anthology show than a feature length movie because there is very little to be actually accomplished once the blindness sets in.
"Blindness" throughout all its madness tries to make a point, but it all comes up as a trivial mess. Surely, we are not going to learn anything by watching "Blindness." I have a feeling most will turn it off very early on as I was tempted to do. It grates on your nerves something terrible because you lie in wait, anxiously anticipating a payoff, all to no avail.
But because "Blindness" takes itself so seriously and acts with such a heavy-handed agenda, it's a real downer of a movie. It offers nothing of value to the viewer other than a painfully boring way to waste two hours. Occasionally provocative, but constantly dull "Blindness" shows humankind at its worst in a prophetic vision of a nightmarish future. "Blindness" should have remained the book it was because as a movie, it's a failed experiment.
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