'Blindness,' starring Julianne Moore and Mark Ruffalo, is an apocalyptic vision that loses its way

by John Petkovic/Plain Dealer Reporter

Thursday October 02, 2008, 11:59 PM

Miramax FilmsA doctor's wife (Julianne Moore) becomes the only person with the ability to see in a town where everyone is struck with a mysterious case of sudden blindness. She feigns illness in order to take care of her husband (Mark Ruffalo, left) as her surrounding community breaks down into chaos and disorder.

Apocalyptic visions set in the future are supposed to make you squirm in the present. Otherwise, you're watching the next installment of "Star Wars." "Blindness" is the squirming kind, no doubt. But Fernando Meirelles' adaptation of Jose Saramago's novel is a vision as blurry as the eyeballs of its characters.

Set in the future, in some unnamed city, it focuses on an epidemic in which people lose their eyesight.

The opening set-up is stellar in its visual intensity: We see close-ups of stoplights, then a panorama of a busy street going about its way. Then a man in on one of those busy streets, waiting for one of those lights to change.

He is paralyzed; he has suddenly gone blind. Horns honk, motorists curse -- oblivious to what has befallen the man and what, no doubt, will befall them in time.

Well, that was good while it lasted.

Within 20 minutes, we're stumbling along with the man and the people he has infected, but not in a good way.

The blind are quarantined in a hospital where they stagger about, like prisoners in some concentration camp. Save one internee -- the wife of an eye doctor (Julianne Moore) who, somehow, is not affected by the epidemic.

Food is scarce; no one in the outside world seems to care.

Why?

Is it callousness or has the epidemic spread outside these grimy walls, subjecting the city to paralyzing blindness?

Meirelles fails to consider the question or the dynamic. Instead, he stumbles along, like the inmates, bumping into one wall of depravity after another.

At times, the claustrophobia of "Blindness" is taut and chilling. But the epidemic never spreads from the screen to the seats.

My eyes felt none of the visual engagement of the opening five minutes.

Rather than conveying blindness, Meirelles rolls out an apocalyptic action flick with a social message -- where the motif is a never-ending pool of misery, full of defecation, sex slaves and depravity that, even under these circumstances, is inexplicable.

"Blindness" tries to swim out of it all with portentous dialogue and high-concept musings. And it'll make you squirm in your seat.

But someone, please, take my vision. I can't watch this anymore.