Blindness

Director Fernando Meirelles (City of God, The Constant Gardener) and actor-writer Don McKellar adapt José Saramago’s 1995 novel, in which, save for one woman (Julianne Moore), a city’s entire population (including Mark Ruffalo, Danny Glover and Gael García Bernal) suddenly, inexplicably, goes blind—and hell accordingly breaks loose. You may worry that the moviefication of serious, political, page-long sentences of non-English fable fiction from a Nobel laureate will translate into earnestly leaden Oscar bait. In fact, Blindness is the best arty disaster thriller starring Julianne Moore since Children of Men. Of course, it is the only arty disaster thriller starring Julianne Moore since Children of Men. She performs strongly if not memorably, while Ruffalo humanizes his variously groping ophthalmologist, and Bernal might be miscast as a menacing opportunist. Nearly drowning them all in a soup of shadow, bleach and blur, Meirelles can’t see his own forest for the trees; he does at least achieve a kind of allegorical myopia.