Blindness

When a sudden plague of blindness devastates a city, a small group of the afflicted band together to triumphantly overcome the horrific conditions of their imposed quarantine.

The themes of "Blindness" go by in a blur. When residents of a nameless cosmo polis are suddenly struck blind, the vagueness seems so deliberate that the allegory could be steering our attention to AIDS, pacifism, the surreal craziness of Latin American dictatorship or the Golden Rule. Director Fernando Meirelles ("The Constant Gardener") situates the outbreak in an unidentified international-flavored city. When one man suddenly loses his sight while his car is stopped at a traffic light, the shocking ease with which total strangers slip into bad Samaritanism sets the grim tone. You don't normally expect a movie to be this unpleasant to sit through unless it's about the Holocaust or was directed by Edward Burns. Blindness seems to be contagious, and soon so many people have been struck blind that an authoritarian government forces them into an abandoned mental hospital. Among them are an ophthalmologist (Mark Ruffalo) and his wife (Julianne Moore), who can see but pretends to be blind so she can look after her man. Why she alone is immune is a mystery; she's sort of like the doctor in "The Plague." As the wards fill up with helpless victims and the halls teem with human waste, a younger man (Gael Garcia Bernal) declares himself dictator - first jokingly, then not. Things that shouldn't matter anymore suddenly matter more than ever - race, money, jewels.

I kept hoping the meaning would click into place, but it never quite did. The story seems designed to apply to whatever fear is nibbling around your subconscious. If the moral is that we all ought to be nice to each other, that isn't quite enough with which to close out such a strange, sometimes harrowing and sometimes wicked movie. This was done well enough to keep you entertained, scared and at times downright repulsed, but that's the point. What would you do if you lost the most important of the five senses? Or better yet, what do you do if the one closest to you loses his sight along with the rest of the city except you? How do you cope? Some scenes at times seem a bit too graphic, but it doesn't change the fact that this one was really well done. A hefty 4 on my "Go See" scale.