I found myself pondering, after watching the movie, if it was even possible to film Blindness. Famously, Saramago resisted letting anybody have the movie rights for years, and Meirelles and writer Don McKellar lobbied over and over again to make it into a film. They say Saramago's reluctance was due to the fact that he didn't want the book made into an "exploitation film," and I'm sure that's part of it. But it's also such a quirky, weird book, that I'm at a loss to think how you could make a successful film of it.

The thing I liked most about the movie was that it amplified the theme from the book, that the social order can construct itself in very different ways, depending on how the chips fall. When the blindness epidemic first strikes, an ophthalmologist and his patients are the first people to be struck ill. They all wind up quarantined inside a kind of dormitory, with armed guards keeping them inside. The doctor's wife comes along, even though she keeps her sight the entire time.

Here's what I got more clearly from the movie than the book: in Ward 1, where the doctor and his wife are bunked up, there's a car thief. He went blind because he helped the first victim of the epidemic, and then stole the victim's car. There's a moment where the car thief tries to take charge over everyone else in Ward 1, basically saying that everyone should kiss his ass. He gets shot down, and instead the doctor and his wife end up being in charge. (And the car thief later dies.) That means the people in Ward 1 mostly survive. Meanwhile, Ward 3 puts a total buttwad in charge — the self-proclaimed "King of Ward 3," who's not that different from the car thief — and in the end, the people in Ward 3 all die as a result. But you can see how close the people in Ward 1 come to letting the car thief become the King of Ward 1, and it's fascinating and a little scary. The difference between keeping a semblance of civilization and turning into total barbarians is pretty slight, especially when the norms of society have broken down.

In the movie, as in the book, the message is that people can adapt to anything. And this becomes a blessing as well as a curse. Eventually, the people in Ward 3 steal all of the asylum's food supplies, and they demand all the other wards' women. If Ward 1 doesn't turn over its women for the Ward 3 men to rape, everyone in Ward 1 will starve. In the end, everyone in Ward 1 becomes complict in the rape of the ward's women, and it's excruciating to watch them talk themselves into seeing it as okay.

(Random digression: It's interesting — writers have often treated blindness as a desirable lapse into sensuality and primal vigor. Maybe because writers are so dependent on their eyes, they perversely fantasize about how wonderful it would be to lose them. In D.H. Lawrence's story "The Blind Man," the rough sensualist Maurice gains a weird animalistic power from being blinded in Flanders, and he utterly terrifies the effete intellectual, Bertie, who had been a rival for Maurice's wife's affections. In V.S. Pritchett's story, "Blind Love," a blind man becomes a woman's ideal lover because he memorizes her body with his fingers and because he can't see her birthmark. But the idea of mass blindness as a metaphor for the way people collude in dehumanizing systems is sort of a reversal of Lawrence and Pritchett treating the blind as the only true individuals.)

I kept going back and forth with myself about what the book had that the movie lacked. Here's what I finally came up with: the book is chatty. It's like your cubicle-mate who wants to talk about every detail of their weekend. It's just jam-packed with neurotic, running dialog, that never even pauses. One of the idiosyncrasies of the book is that the dialog is just separated with commas, with sentences running together. The book's narrative voice is so strong — nattering, going on little digressions, recounting old proverbs, and sort of clucking its tongue all the time — and you can't have that in a movie.

That chattering style creates the sense of a communal "Greek chorus," made up of the narrator and the random characters, who are all talking at once. In a book that's all about how a group of newly blinded strangers join together to form a community, either for good or ill, this anonymous chatter reinforces the sense that "society" is talking to you. Most importantly, it gives a weird sense of warmth, the feeling that even though you're reading about horrible squalor and barbarism, there's still an undercurrent of kindness in this constant communication.

I don't know how you could convey that effect in a movie. Maybe by having people talking very fast, over each other, and with lots of neurotic chatter. It sort of makes sense to me that people who were navigating by sound and touch, without a sense of sight, would talk a lot as a way of finding each other. Which may be why they tried having a Danny Glover voice-over in an earlier cut of the film, to give that extra layer of narrative voice. There's one short section of Glover's voice-over left in the movie, and it's pretty awful. I can't imagine how bad the movie would be if Glover was narrating throughout.

In any case, the final cut of the movie goes for the standard art-film treatment, with lots of long pauses and silences, and moody music. Meirelles uses lots and lots of camera tricks to try and convey the disorientation of most of the people in the movie being blind, and it's often super effective. The camera focuses and unfocuses, the screen turns overexposed then underexposed. In the scene where Ruffalo goes blind, he's blurry and Julianne Moore is in focus. Things go white and blotchy at random, and the scary visuals reinforce the movie's claustrophobic motif pretty well. The actual scene where the men of Ward 3 rape the women of Ward 1 is totally abstract.

It all works pretty well, in parts, but for some reason I had a hard time connecting with a lot of the characters.

There are a few reasons for this. One major problem is that I never got a sense that the doctor (Mark Ruffalo) and his wife (Julianne Moore) actually liked each other. He's rude and dismissive towards her before he goes blind, which wasn't the case in the book. And after he goes blind and she keeps her sight, he's alternately whiny and jerky towards her. In the book, they share a lot of affection, even after the doctor cheats on his wife. In the movie, I got the sense they'd rather not be in the same room together. I had a sneaking feeling this was an attempt to wring more drama out of the story, which seemed misguided — because a nation of blind people starving and stumbling around naked in their own filth? Not really lacking in drama. I've liked Ruffalo in other things, but in Blindness he grates pretty badly. I felt like one of the book's main emotional anchors, the relationship between the doctor and his wife, was totally missing. (When I got to interview Meirelles earlier today, he mentioned that they wanted to give the doctor and his wife more of an "arc" from having a broken marriage to rediscovering each other, but this felt like a really bad decision in practice.)

Glover, meanwhile, feels pretty miscast as the "old man with an eyepatch." His performance just didn't work at all. I think he was going for sweet and folksy, and he overshot. I feel like I've seen Gael Garcia Bernal be good in other things, but he's way too over the top as the King of Ward 3 — it's like they dropped the villain from Nine Deaths Of The Ninja into this movie.

The standout performance in the film is Julianne Moore, who totally brings the character of the doctor's wife alive. Maybe because she's the only actor allowed to act with her eyes in the film, or maybe just because she keeps a sense of hard-won dignity as things get more and more squalid in the filth-strewn asylum. Her rage is chilling, and her grief during and after the rape scene is pretty overwhelming. She's in a much better movie than the rest of the cast, A-list though many of them are.

Actually, there's one other standout performance in the film, and it's one of the few great improvements over the book. In the book, the Ward 3 leader's main accomplice is an accountant, who was actually blind since birth and wound up in quarantine by mistake. The "blind accountant" is a pretty minor figure in the book, who tries to join ward 1 at one point, but then changes his mind. But in the movie, played by Maury Chaykin, he becomes the most interesting character. He's obviously deeply conflicted about helping Ward 3 steal everyone else's food, but then he finds a way to rationalize it by being exaggeratedly courtly. When he helps to organize the gang rape of the Ward 1 women, he puts on a weird facade of gallantry. He treats it like a fun date — they're not really gang-raping those women, they're just appreciating them and calling them "ladies." All through the rape scene, where women are screaming out with pain and horror, you hear the accountant being dreadfully polite and saying things loudly like, "May I touch your nipple please?" It's totally revolting and yet utterly believable — people do what they have to do to rationalize their inhuman behavior. I wish the movie had taken more chances like that.

In the end, the movie has a lot of beautifully shot scenes, and it conveys the book's dark themes about society pretty well. But because I couldn't connect with most of the characters, it felt a little bit empty to me, like I was watching an anonymous horror show.

And then the last half hour of the film fizzles a bit. Major spoiler: at the end of both the book and the movie, the blind people leave their asylum and discover that the outside world is just as bad. Everyone's gone blind and people have been reduced to scavenging animals. In the book, it's a pretty horrible discovery. In the movie, once you lose the claustrophobia of the closed-in asylum scenes, the urgency goes out of the narrative. Instead of a realization that living outside the asylum, with dwindling food stores around town and gangs of feral animals and humans, will be increasingly unsustainable, the movie goes a bit soft and there's a lot of dancing in the rain and stuff. It feels as though the ordeal is over when they get out of the asylum, but then the film goes on for another half an hour.

(And minor quibble, but one of the nicest moments in the book, where a stray dog licks away the doctor's wife's tears, is totally ruined in the movie because two events are collapsed together. In the book, the dog licks her tears and becomes her friend, and then 20 or 30 pages later, you see dogs eating a dead human body. In the movie, the two scenes are combined into one, leaving you feeling as though she's being licked by a tongue that was just snacking on human flesh a moment ago. The movie also loses the character of the selfish old woman, who provides a lot of the final section's pathos and horror.)

Bottom line: If you love the book, you'll find the movie an interesting take on its themes, but a bit of a let-down in the end. If you hate the book, you'll definitely hate the movie. And if you haven't read the book, I'm really not sure how much you'll get out of the film. It may be worth seeing just for award-worthy performances from Julianne Moore and Maury Chaykin.

In Blindness, a eye doctor (Mark Ruffalo) and his patients are among the first victims of the inexplicable epidemic, which turns your vision milky white. They wind up locked in an asylum under armed guard, along with the doctor's wife (Julianne Moore), who keeps her sight. They create a semblance of order in Ward 1, but then the barbaric inmates of Ward 3 seize all the food supplies and impose their own rule over the asylum, culminating in a sexual assault on all the women in other wards. Eventually, the inmates get out and discover the outside world has collapsed into total chaos.

We were lucky enough to talk to Fernando Meirelles this morning, and here's what he had to say:

One thing that really struck me about the film was the way you used the camera to try and create a feeling of disorientation with the camera going in and out of focus, and blurring into white and so on. How much did you experiment with that?

To be honest, when I was shooting the film, I thought I would go much further, that the film would be much more abstract. But then, when you have great actors, it's very hard not to use them. Anyway, [I liked] the idea of finding a different way of shooting some parts of the film. Usually where you shoot the film, you have the camera where the point of view of the characters are, right? You have the actor turning his head and looking at some point, and you see where he's looking. In this film, the characters have no point of view. How am I going to tell this story if the characters have no point of view? So that was the solution. It came out very poetic, I thought.

So most of the movie takes place in an asylum where the characters are trapped, and it captures an amazing feeling of claustrophobia, with the walls seeming to close in all the time. And yet, it's just a normal institutional space. How did you achieve that?

We were very lucky to find that space. The space where we shot the asylum is a prison actually, for mental prisoners. And it was empty, so we were very lucky to find this. What we did was just try to find a good pallette for the film's colors, and as the film progreses, we see that the set is degraded. So it gets dirtier and dirtier, and we planned for each scene how far should we go with the filth. The walls should be dirty, and... That was all planned, even for the wardrobe and the makeup. When we planed the film, we had three stages for the degradation [so that the scenery and costumes would match for each scene in a section of the film.]

Did you ever debate how far to go with the filth and excrement and grossness? In the book they're basically living in their own shit.

The book is much worse. I shot more degrading images... The first two or three cuts of the film were darker, you know. But then I felt that I didn't need to go so far to sell my point, and at some point the film gets too disgusting, and you don't want to watch any more. So I tried to find the right balance. I had the images, and I could go further, or I could just pull back. In the cutting room, that's where I honed it, where I decided where I would go... I really don't see any point in shocking [for its own sake.] Have you seen a film by Gaspar Noé called Irreversible?

I haven't, no.

There's a scene with Monica Bellucci, where she's raped. It's a twelve minute sequence of rape, and the camera is steady and it's very shocking. I remember watching this film with a big audience, and part of the audience leaving the theater because of that scene. It's a very great film, but some people don't like it just because of that scene. I thought about Irreversible when I was making my film. Actually, I've talked to Gaspar directly, and he doesn't think that scene is a mistake. But anyway, I felt my first cut was very unbalanced.

Did you get any pressure from Miramax to make your film less shocking?

No. What really maybe shocked me was I did a test screening in Toronto. It was the sixth cut. And we had around 500 people in the theater, and I think 62 walked out. There were two rape scenes. In the first rape scene, there were four or five women who left, and in the second one a bunch of people just stood up and left the theater. I was shocked by that. I didn't know it was so strong. After that I went back and said, "I can't have people walk out." That, to me, was the turning point. And then I showed the film again at a second test screening in New York, and only a few women walked out in the rape scene.

The screening in Toronto, was that the film festival that just happened?

No, it was before, it was in January. The film wasn't ready yet. I thought the film was ready, and then the repsonse was so crazy, so many people leaving, I decided to recut. It was a problem of balance. Sometimes you have a film where more and more people leave the theater... but [in this case] it was only during the rape scene. [That means] I didn't prepare them to get to the scene, or the scene is really too much.

And in the final cut, the rape scenes are almost abstract.

Sometimes when you don't show things, [and] you only suggest, it's much stronger than showing, right?

One thing about the rape sequence that was really interesting was the role of the accountant, who was born blind. He's one of the main organizers of the rape scene. And he tries to act all gentlemanly and gallant towards the women he's helping to gang rape, talking to them politely throughout. That's not really in the book. Where did that come from?

It's creepy, isn't it? The lines that he's saying there. Maury Chaykin, who plays the accountant, thought of this guy trying to be kind. He came up with his lines, it was improvised. At first, when I heard, I laughed a lot like it was a joke, but then when I cut the voices, the lines, for the film, I felt it was really creepy.

Another thing that really jumped out at me is at the start of the movie, the car thief, who's played by screenwriter Don McKellar, says everyone should kiss up to him. It seems like he comes close to becoming the king of Ward 1, but then everyone rejects his leadership and puts the doctor and his wife in charge instead. This was much stronger in the movie than in the book, I felt. Were you trying to suggest that Ward 1 could easily have gone the same way as Ward 3, which descends into barbarism?

He didn't have a gun [so he couldn't take charge, like the other guy in Ward 3.] In the book, in the beginning, you feel that [the car thief is] going to be the bad guy, but then he dies and there's this other guy that comes. There's one idea from the book for this character that we used in the film, and I think it's the main idea of this character. In the book, he says at some point that after he goes blind he was able to think better. He was able to understand the things he's seen. It's like a paragraph. In the book, we used that line, when Julianne Moore comes to see him in bed. He says, "I can see better now, I can help." His ideas are much clearer. For me, this makes sense. I did some workshops of blindness just to see how it felt. I used a blindfold for hours and hours, with a group that was preparing to be extras in the film. It's amazing how, after a few hours with a blindfold, you really think different, you are more in touch with yourself. I think vision is very distracting. After four or five hours of walking with a blindfold and having to touch things, and relating to people only by touching them not by talking or seeing. For me it was very pleasant. But anyway, when the thief says, "I'm a better person. I think better," I understand what he's saying. I felt like I could feel my feelings better.

How hard was it to shoot all those scenes at the end, with the streets of the city filled with garbage and disoriented blind people?

We shot that in Sao Paolo, where I live. We wanted the film to be placed in a big city, but very generic, [one] that people wouldn't recognize. It was very easy to shoot here, and we were able to convince the traffic department to clear the streets so we could shoot. It was a big operation, but I think it came out very well. The film just came out a few weeks ago in Sao Paolo and it's been a huge success. The film is really big in Brazil.

Some activist groups for the blind have protested your film because of a negative portrayal of blind people. What do you think about that?

I understand their concerns, but I really don't agree with their point of view. This is not a film about blind people, it is about human nature. All the blind people in the film are not blind like the blind people in that association. They're people who have gone blind and had no time to adapt. The only blind person in the film, who is Maury Chaykin, is very well adapted and efficient. The most efficient person in the asylum is Maury Chaykin, who is able to organize the group and feed everybody. The others are people who have lost their sight, and had no time and no conditions to prepare. There are so many brilliant artists and scientists and businessmen who are blind... I never thought this story could be criticized.

It feels like Julianne Moore's character is the emotional center of the film, even more than in the book.

I think she's stronger in the film. I agree with you.

How did that come about?

Well, you call Julianne Moore, and you have it. She was really commited and engaged. It's amazing the way she jumps into a project, with all her body, soul and mind...

In the book, the doctor and his wife have a really strong loving relationship. In the movie, though, they don't seem to get along that well. Why the change?

In the book, from the beginning they're a couple that works well, and I tried to create a kind of arc for this couple. In the beginning, they're not in a crisis, but it's not a great marriage. He really doesn't see her, and she doesn't see herself as well, she's kind of a limited housewife. Her world revolves around him and he's a bit arrogant and in control. And little by little, when they move to the asylum, she has become the leader, and little by little he loses his leadership. And he has to be taken care of by her. It's like he's being castrated by her. That's our thought. Maybe he makes love with the girl with dark glasses just because he was feeling like he's being castrated, his male-hood was being challenged. But in the end after this journey and suffering, he learns to see her. He's less blind. He says to [his wife], "I remember, you're beautiful, I see you," it's a beautiful line at the end. In the book, the story of the couple is kind of flat, so we tried to create an arc for them, so he learns to see her. And she learns to see that she's much more than what she thought. Actually, for all the characters I tried to create arcs like this, that aren't in the book.

One of the really striking things about the book, stylistically, is the way all the dialog runs together, with everybody talking at once. Often there are just commas separating lots of pieces of dialog and you have to guess who's talking. How do you convey that on film?

In the book, it's very short lines, right? He writes very short lines and very direct. We tried to cut the film the same way, with short cuts, very cutted, very fragmented. In some ways this mirrors the style of the [book], but it was more of a coincidence, I have to say. I just shot it and cut the way I do.

Finally, one thing I got very strongly from the film was the sense that people can create social order in all kinds of bizarre and untenable situations. Like we mentioned earlier, with the car thief who you think is going to take over in Ward 1, but he doesn't have a gun.

And he doesn't have the guts.

Or the guts. So it doesn't take that much to turn Ward 1 into Ward 3. And that's part of why the people in Ward 1 accept Ward 3 as being in charge.

We have really the capacity of adapting, like cockroaches. We adapt very fast. It's amazing. We get used to crises.

And that's not always a good thing.

It's not bad, it's not good. It's how we are. We learn to adapt. The film's coming out in a very interesting period to me. Today, waiting the approval of this [bailout] package in the American Congress, my friend said, "The world is weaiting for this, everybody is going to go crazy." But then I asked him, "What happens if Congress doesn't approve this package?" He said, "Well it's going to be a disaster. But we'll adapt. We'll find a way." We always find our way.

Reviewing the Toronto version, Cinematical's Kim Voynar writes:

I'm happy to report that the newly edited version of Blindness is a vast improvement over what we saw at Cannes. Not only did director Fernando Meirelles (who also made one of the best films ever, City of God) remove the irritating and distracting voiceover, but as a result of doing so had to significantly re-cut, and in the process ended up with a much, much better film. He's tightened it up a lot, particularly a very troublesome bit concerning a major character arc shift for Julianne Moore's character, The Doctor's Wife, which was one of the parts I most had trouble with at Cannes. And while the film's running time is about the same, it now paces much quicker and thus feels like a tauter, shorter film that's much more engaging.

Similarly, InContention.com said the new version of Blindness is "superb." On the other hand, the Hollywood Reporter remained grim, saying the film got a similar "tepid" response to the one it got at Cannes.

So what went wrong in Cannes? The film-makers hadn't actually seen their own movie before it premiered at the festival, McKellar explained to Cinematical:

It's partly a technological problem. We were trying to finish the film in time for Cannes... the picture was being done here, the sound was being done in Brazil, and none of us had seen it until that night in Cannes... It's possible, they can stream the sound over and match it with the picture in Paris, where they subtitle. That's never been the case before... And so when we saw it, it was a bit weird, because there were a lot of things still in debate.

It was "kind of a nightmare" for the high-profile screening in Cannes to be "kind of a test-screening." The Danny Glover voice-over wasn't originally in the script, but was added later, in several different versions. The film-makers "waylaid" Glover in Denver and Salt Lake City and had him re-record the voiceovers a few times.

McKellar also explains that when Saramago finally agreed to let him and Meirelles make a film of Blindness, after several rebuffs, he set some conditions. One was that the movie had to be in English, and another was that it had to take place in an unidentified city, which necessitated creating a blend of countries. [Cinematical]

Blindness was our best hope for a thoughtful future dystopian story after a deluge of mindless action films. It combines an interesting concept, a stellar cast and a promising director. I've been hoping that this movie would continue the Children of Men legacy of thoughtful scifi films (minus the whole CG baby incident). Alas, early reviews using terms like "misfire" and "failure" are breaking my heart. In particular, critics who saw the film at the Cannes Film Festival are howling over a terrible voice-over by Danny Glover among other downfalls.

The Telegraph:

They [the cast] do well to save a film that, in trying so hard to be faithful to the novel, falls prey to tone-deafness.

Cinematical:

[Danny Glover's] voice-over not only feels like it's taken directly from the book but actually pushes us away from contemplating the themes and scenes of the film. It's one thing to suggest that life's busy nature makes us all overlook the true nature of the world; it's another thing to hear Glover intone, during the film's initial moments, how "I don't think we went blind; I think we always were. ..." Leaving that insight, and others like it, unsaid might possibly leave us to contemplate it for ourselves; having those things spoken out loud just inspires derision.

Hollywood-Elsewhere:

The movie, I fear, is going to be generally "meh"-ed when it opens, and audiences are almost certainly going to steer clear....But the truth is that Blindness is more than a bit of a flub...For what it's worth, the pacing, performances and tech credits are first-rate.

I'm crossing my fingers, waiting for the film's release date of September 26, and hoping for the best. More stills at Rotten Tomatoes.

In the book, if memory serves, it's only one city that starts having an epidemic of blindness. But this trailer makes it sound as though the blindness is striking worldwide. The only thing that worries me about this trailer is the way the music swells hopefully at the end as Julianne Moore makes a stirring speech. As you can tell from the trailer, she's the only one in the quarantine hospital who can still see, and she's standing up to the self-proclaimed "King Of Ward 3."

Friend of io9 James Rocchi saw Blindness at Cannes and gave it a pretty positive review over at Cinematical:

The descent into savagery is depicted with brutal force in Blindness; many viewers will retreat from that fall's hideous strength through questioning smaller moments in the plot and character motivation, and Blindness unfortunately leaves them plenty of room in which to do so. But while Blindness can be faulted for many things, it also has to be respected for its ambition, craft, and effort; Blindness shows us a world of wide-eyed sightlessness, and it does so through a fierce vision that only occasionally loses focus.

[Alliance Films via GetTheBigPicture]

Blindness is based on a novel by Jose Saramago, who also wrote The Gospel According to Jesus Christ and Baltasar and Blimunda. Like Triffids, it deals with a mysterious plague of blindness that leaves almost everyone in a city unable to see. And like Triffids, it shows society breaking down and people descending into barbaric squalor in fairly short order. Unlike Triffids, however, the blind people still keep a lot of their humanity.

In the novel, all of the blind people are quarantined in an asylum where they live in squalor, until the soldiers guarding them go blind as well. But it looks like the movie will take a leaf from Doomsday's book and actually quarantine the entire city, walling it off to keep the infection from spreading.

Besides Moore, the film stars Mark Ruffalo as Moore's blind husband, a doctor, Danny Glover as the man with the black eyepatch, and Sandra Oh as the Minister of Health who seals off the city. (Yay, Sandra Oh!) It's directed by the Oscar-nominated Fernando Meirelles, who directed City Of God and The Constant Gardener.

Let's hope that this film does well enough that Meirelles, or someone, gets to film the sequel, which is even weirder. In Seeing, it's a few years later, and everyone's almost forgotten that nasty plague of blindness. Until the city holds an election, and almost all of the ballots turn up blank. Everybody decides to blame Julianne Moore's character, because she kept her sight during the plague. The literal blindness finally makes its transition into being figurative political blindness.