Film

It’s possible to turn an allegedly unfilmable novel into something cinematically compelling, if not equal in stature (Catch-22, Cronenberg’s Crash). José Saramago’s Nobel Prize–winning book presents its own problems: Forget the story’s apocalyptic bleakness—movies love a good dystopia—but how do you show an epidemic of blindness onscreen?

If Fernando Meirelles’s well-intentioned adaptation can be considered successful by any measure, it’s in the way that the director and cinematographer César Charlone visually capture both the malady and civilization coming apart at the seams. Everything is rendered in migraine-bright, bleached imagery; for once, that washed-out, overlit aesthetic employed in every third movie doesn’t seem gratuitous. Even more unnerving is the use of darkness when flesh is traded for food in a quarantine prison, leaving sound to convey the degradation. And when the last seeing person (Moore) leads survivors to safety, the glimpses of a Third World Toronto chill to the bone.

The look fits the story; the movie’s vision, however, is impaired. Meirelles adds little to Saramago’s notions of fascism or divine salvation, and every nightmarish moment contends with images of characters tripping over each other like Keystone Cops. Blindness lets you clearly see the author’s notions of humankind at its worst, yet the book’s poetry is nowhere in sight.