Stars:
***
Rating: R for sexuality,
violence and adult themes
Run
Time: 1
hour, 55 minutes
Director Fernando
Meirelles (smarter than smart “City of God” and “The Constant Gardener”)
tackles José Saramago’s searing stream of consciousness novel with intriguing
but mixed results.
The resurrection
of humanity is a touchy subject; uncomfortable on its surface and downright
horrifying beneath. Such is the case for the residents of the edgy, unnamed
Anytown where an epidemic of blindness, known as the “white sickness” descends
on a bewildered population.
Psychosomatic
or neurological? Scientists are at wits end as the country falls into a state
of crisis and victims are sent to camps housed in an abandoned mental asylum to
fend for themselves. Among them is a brilliant eye doctor (Mark Ruffalo) whose
20/20 vision abandons him, and his seeing wife (Julianne Moore) who is
inexplicably spared yet refuses to leave her husband behind.
Assuming
the blindness is contagious the camps are quarantined; dissolving into a putrid
state of filth and disrepair as their hungry residents yearn for provisions and
aid.
Shades of
Nazi concentration camps and/or “Lord of the Flies”; a bitter populace stooping
to the lowest common denominator on the compassion scale. One violent ward
supervisor (Gael Garcia Bernal) goes so far as to barter valuables for food.
When those run out he trades sexual relations with the camps’ females for
whatever is left to eat. Conditions hit rock bottom and the sighted woman takes
action into her own hands with haunting results.
Meirelles
appears to be of two minds here; one in keeping with the blistering, earthy
tone of Saramago’s allegorical masterpiece and the other with a propensity for
cinematic affectation – milky, bleached out frames, good vs. evil and potential
apocalypse lurking around every corner. This from the man who colored Brazil’s
ferocious favelas irresistible in “God”; heavy-handed rebirth of civilization
aside he certainly has the touch.