Blindness

In his essay Conclusion, David Mamet makes the rather obvious observation that how a film ends will decide the way you view your use of the past two hours of your life. Did you see a great film about grand ideas, or did you surprisingly find yourself bilked of a great experience by a crappy ending? A film that sucks from the beginning is, one can reasonably expect, going to remain weak for its duration. But a film that is good for the most part can live or die by how it concludes. The only reason to mention this, of course, is to prepare you for a crappy ending to an filmic experience that could have had some kind of significance. Blindness is a film that has a pedigree: it’s based on a novel by a Nobel Prize winning writer, José Saramago; it’s directed by the guy who did City Of God and it has some great actors doing some fairly courageous work. It also has Danny Glover delivering annoying voiceovers.

The story is potent. A city overrun by an epidemic of contagious blindness quarantines all the infected in an abandoned mental institution and leaves them to fend for themselves. Food is supplied at intervals, and they’re kept under armed guard. Anyone trying to leave is killed, such is the fear of infection. Inside, the people slowly turn feral as they blindly scrabble around. A few people, the noble doctor and his wife mainly, try to hold things together, but fail as nasty men with guns take control of the food supply and demand first money, and then women to supply food to the other wards. There are sickening scenes of orgiastic rape and assorted brutality as the men of Ward 3 assert their dominance over the masses. Then the doctor’s wife, blessed with the ability to see, fights back, along with other violated women and in the aftermath of that, discover they are a lot freer than they imagined. I can’t deny there’s a great power to these scenes, but that’s not the whole of the film. If it were, it would be a strong one with an ambiguous, but satisfying, ending. But sadly, it keeps going for another half hour, and in the context of the final third of the film, the horrors witnessed become throwaway events, as the real story becomes evident and the thoroughly brutal and disturbing scenes become less relevant to the film's new agenda.

The story is, it turns out, about The Doctor’s Wife, a woman who isn’t as smart as her husband, is kind but is also taken for granted, who, by virtue of being the only person who can see in a world of the blind, becomes the most important person in that world. Suddenly she’s valued, even as her husband resents his dependence on her. This is also a good story, but until the film's final moments it only receives occasional lip service in the midst of an exercise obsessed with showing the horror of man’s inhumanity. When the film finally ends, it’s hard to say I cared because I’d been worn out by the nastiness of the first two thirds and I was resentful of the self-indulgent final third.

So, on the one hand, Blindness is undoubtedly one of the most effective speculative “art-horror” films to come out in quite a while. It’s very effective at keeping you tense, filled with apprehension and horror at what people are capable of (and in the latter department you are guaranteed to be horrified). But it’s also a confused muddle that fails to create any justification for its multiple assaults on the audience. Watch it if you enjoy getting kicked in the guts repeatedly, but don't be surprised if you fail to draw any meaning from it.

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