No Longer Taking My Sight for Granted

I finally had the chance to see Blindness this weekend. I wasn't expecting much going in, having read Christopher Orr's scathing review in addition to a couple of other less critical but still unfavorable responses. (His brutal final paragraph: "Blindness is a glum, ugly film, and pretentious in the bargain. But, perhaps least excusable, it is a fundamentally ill-conceived film, the visual depiction of a world without sight. It is further evidence, I fear, that a gifted filmmaker [Fernando Meirelles] is losing his own vision.")

Nonetheless, I was surprised to find that I liked it. Julianne Moore was fantastic, and Gael García Bernal, although unable to entirely shake that strand of adolescent roguishness in any of his roles, was suitably loathsome. A lot of the things critics found unappealing about the movie --that it allegedly offered no great insight about human brutality, the overly optimistic finale, the nameless characters and city, the pretensions of having big ideas-- were problems with the book first, and the movie simply stayed faithful. If you liked the book --and I certainly did, despite my frustration with Saramago's writing style-- the movie does a pretty good job of capturing its essence. The story loses a bit in its journey to the screen, but that's more a reflection of differences inherent to the media, not of Meirelles's direction.