"Blindness" -- A Filmcritic Film Review

Director: Fernando Meirelles
Producer: Andrea Barata Ribeiro, Niv Fichman, Sonoko Sakai
Screenwriter: Don McKellar
Stars: Julianne Moore, Mark Ruffalo, Alice Braga, Danny Glover, Gael GarcÃa Bernal, Mitchell Nye, Don McKellar, Maury Chaykin, Yoshino Kimura, Yusuke Iseya, Sandra Oh
MPAA Rating: R

Filmcritic Rating = 1.5 out of 5 Stars

“I once was blind but now… aw, I’m still blind.”

Fernando Meirelles’ Blindness was adapted from the novel written by Portuguese Nobel-laureate Jose Saramago. The novel follows a singular woman who somehow goes uninfected when a sudden, freakish plague of “white blindness” strikes the planet, leaving her the sole witness to moral and sanitary decay and atrocities unmentionable in a prison for the infected. What was a poetic, exhaustively-brilliant piece of fiction has now become a clunky, clattering, ever-collapsing film of bludgeoning rhetoric. The woman (Julianne Moore) tags along with her ophthalmologist husband (Mark Ruffalo) when he is struck by the blindness and sent to the initial holding facility for the infected…