Film review: Blindness is eye-opening

by Lesley Carter

I bought a ticket for Fernando Meirelles’ film Blindness with jumbled expectations.  Not having read the book (by Nobel laureate Jose Saramago) that the film was based on, I expected at the least a decent suspense-thriller and at the most a sort of commentary on collective ignorance.

What I found instead was a bleak, jarring allegory about how the “able-bodied” world treats the truly helpless.  I don’t know how much the film resembled the author’s original idea, but I think the end product offers worthy discussion points, particularly for today’s church.

The plot, in short, is this:  unexplained blindness begins to spread through the population like a virus.  As more and more inexplicably lose their sight, one woman (Julianne Moore) remains strangely unaffected.

Of course, not all of the afflicted are peaceful, virtuous sufferers - the blind, rounded up and locked away, soon fall prey to an alpha male (Gael Garcia Bernal) who assembles a band of thugs and seizes control, confiscating rations and demanding payment for food.  Moore - pretending to be blind in order to stay with her husband (Mark Ruffalo) - assumes the role of pragmatic negotiator and den mother to the newly oppressed.

The audience has to accept a few unusual premises.  There’s no medical explanation for either the outbreak or Moore’s immunity.  But in Saramago’s story, the specifics are not as important as the blindness itself, which allows us to examine human behavior under extreme circumstances.

The blind find themselves living a volatile, structure-less scenario, groping along cinderblock walls and ducking the wrath of the self-declared ruling party.  Bernal and his crew are afflicted by the same disease as everyone else, yet they dominate because they’re willing to aggressively take advantage of those around them.

In watching the story unfold, it’s hard not to find parallels to global poverty and the way it’s ignored by much of the West.  Extreme hardship has a way of amplifying a society’s nastiest element - which is why much of the Developing World finds itself under the rule of small, corrupt factions like Bernal’s.  Perhaps examining human behavior within this context would be a sensible first step for the First World to take when developing its policies about foreign aid and intervention.

One parallel is especially troubling: once Bernal’s gang has harvested all the valuables, he proposes a new exchange of “women for food” - implicating the residents in their very own version of the sex trade.  This calls on Moore and others to offer themselves as sacrifices for the good of the group, and the scene that follows brings the realities of human trafficking home with blunt, nauseating force.

Blindness is far from perfect.  While I prefer fast-paced movies, this one at times seems to plow through its plot too quickly - the viewer doesn’t have many opportunities to breathe and reflect on what’s just happened.  Also, much of the film is hard on the eyes - due both to the photography and content.

But I think that it opens the discussion of how the world’s needy are treated by the world’s self-reliant, and I think that it’s opening that discussion at a very crucial time.  Faltering stock markets worldwide are making many of us focus on our own futures. Maybe now is the best time for us to shift our focus to those who have always questioned their survival.

The film ends on a note of uncertainty, but with the suggestion of hope.  I don’t think that hope is part of the fiction.  I think the hope lies in our capacity to show compassion to the helpless.  Perhaps, with God’s help, we have the power to restore sight to the blind after all.

Reviewer: Lesley Carter is a copywriter and editor living in Atlanta, GA, USA. Growing up with Salvation Army officer parents laid the foundation for what would become a life spent searching for the true meaning of service and community - and how both factor into God’s purpose for her life. Lesley serves theRubicon as a copy editor and sometimes-writer.

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