Last night I had a chance to see Blindness, the screen adaptation of Jose Saramago's "plague" novel directed by City of God visionary Fernando Meirelles.  With the recent criticism and protesting from the National Federation of the Blind(NFB) I was expecting a parade of the visually-impaired marching outside the movie theater with bullhorns—the NFB claims the film depicts blindness in a negative light.

Now I love apocalyptic films.  From The Day After Tomorrow to The Happening to 28 Days Later, I admit there's a part of me that longs for some mammoth force to wipe clean the environmentally-unfriendly, the politically-corrupt and the religiously-arrogant, and start anew.  And in these much-adored catastrophe films, the viewer is normally supplied with an impetus for the pending doom and the horrifying fallout that emerges during and afterward. 

Blindness leaves out the impetus.  It starts with a man who suddenly goes blind and, of course, thousands are affected soon after—without explanation.  I was bored and frustrated.  For at least the first first 20 minutes.  If there wasn't some person wailing about their new blindness, there were people meandering the city wailing about their blindness.  And if Danny Glover's patched-eye character "explained" one more thing about the chaos gone amok when a seeing-person goes blind without a clue about why and how all of this started in the first place I was going to walk out the theater.  It's a plague movie, for crissakes, I needed some backstory.  Where was the virused monkey?  Where was the toxic Central American flower and its lethal pollen?  But then my movie buddy explained that was the point. The novelist Saramago deliberately removed the sci-fi, "what did what how" elements of this movie to focus on the people.  Ten seconds later things got real interesting.

The film quickly morphed into a display of how people come together during disaster to how humans are reduced to "wild animals" when denied food, water and solid sense of safety to how makeshift tribes organize under these conditions and people will do anything for power, or to survive.  Including [SPOILER ALERT] some men who demand the women to give over their sex in exchange for a ration of food.

I won't tell you anything else.  But I will say that Blindness, sans the few times a blind character would bump into a wall and the audience would break out into laughter [which is probably why the NFB was so up in arms], was a very good film.  It's not just a film about physical blindness, but it's also about how human beings can become so muddied by a consumer culture and the benefits of economic privilege that they become blind to each other's humanity and it takes a literal blindness to purge out the sometimes-disease of modern life and return to the basics, i.e. finding the good in oneself and others. 

I recommend it.