'Blindness' needs to shed a little more light

"There are none so blind as those who cannot see."

That's a quote from the Broadway play and movie "Butterflies Are Free." It was a comedy. The bit of truism holds in the case of "Blindness," but "Blindness" is most definitely not a comedy.

Based on a novel by the Nobel Prize-winning Portuguese writer Jose Saramago, this is about the end of civilization that evolves in a city where hordes of people, maybe everyone except Julianne Moore, have gone blind. The result has people revert to their primitive greediness and violence as in "Lord of the Flies" and most other apocalyptic treatments. (No prize-winning writers seem to be able to see the end of the world as anything but slow and torturous. We do not ever want to be in any position to challenge them.).

First, we see a man go blind in his car in the middle of traffic.

"It's like swimming in milk," he tells us as everything, including the screen, turns white. This is an excuse for director Fernando Meirelles to bleach the entire film so that all of it looks like over-exposed photos.

The idea, one supposes, is to remind us that we might be going blind, too. Everything will turn to light, not to darkness.

Mark Ruffalo turns in another thoughtful and concerned performance as a good man who wavers under the stress of it all. Ruffalo is one of the busiest actors in the industry, but while proving that he is a fine actor he never seems to quite get that breakthrough role that would make him a major star. Here, he is assigned mostly to react and to suffer. Ruffalo is a local product, graduating from high school in Virginia Beach. He gets another chance in the upcoming "The Brothers Bloom."

"Blindness" is worth seeing for its lofty ambition, but it depends too much on plotting action at the expense of character development. Terrible things happen, and we are whisked from one to the next before we have time to be remorseful, much less emotional.

Ruffalo goes blind and is transported to an abandoned mental institution (what else?) where the highly contagious blind are quarantined. His wife, played with her characteristic intelligence by Julianne Moore, is seemingly the only one in the city who can still see. She, wisely, keeps it to herself as the world around her goes berserk.

Gael Garcia Bernal is not believable as a ward leader who declares himself king - suggesting that democracy would easily fold if confronted with a leader who will take charge. His overthrow of the meek is much too sudden, and easy. First he asks for jewels and such in return for food. (Money is worthless.)

When there are no more rocks, he demands that his weakling co-prisoners send over their women.

The filth and degradation pile up, but the movie offers nothing about the dramatic import of all this. It's terrible, but then what? Should we be disgusted, defiant or sympathetic to the victims who seemingly exist only to be victimized?

Danny Glover, this year's lifetime achievement award winner at the Norfolk-ODU film festival, plays the "man with a black eye patch." He shows up occasionally to say the sooth like soothsayers of the ancient classics.

Although the intent is to be sophisticated, director Meirelles too often stoops to gimmicks with his overuse of close-ups and his unfocused teases of oncoming blindness.

His most frightening moment is when he turns the entire screen to dark, leaving us "blind" and hearing threatening things all around us. It works, but it's still a cheap trick. Some of the visual emphasis here is left over from "The Diving Bell and the Butterfly" which, more successfully, managed to suggest a physical disability.

The director has a mixed background. While his "City of God" was overpraised, his "The Constant Gardener" proved that he could adapt difficult books to the screen. This book, though, defied him.

The problem is in having too many characters and too much plot. Perhaps if the film had focused mostly on Moore and Ruffalo, we would have gotten to know them, and care.

As it is, we see a good deal more than we feel.

Mal Vincent, (757) 446-2347, mal.vincent@pilotonline.com.