Blindness (1998)

Director:

Anna Chi

Writers:

Anna Chi (writer)
Jared Rappaport (writer)

Genre:

Drama

Plot:

A blind Asian-American woman lives with her son and daughter-in-law. The two women barely tolerate one another and the son...

Plot Keywords:

Mother | Beautiful Woman | Blindness

Cast

  (Credited cast)

Vivian Wu	...	Natalie
Joe Lando	...	Patrick
Chin Han	...	Daniel Hong
Lisa Lu	...	Mrs. Hong
rest of cast listed alphabetically:
Nely Galan	...	TV Reporter
Nanea Reeves	...	Nurse

Runtime:

88 min | USA:78 min (DVD version)

Country:

USA

Language:

English

Color:

Color

Filming Locations:

Mar Vista, Los Angeles, California, USA

Company:

Park Avenue Productions

The illogic destroys any "deep meaning" in Blindness allegory

*** This review may contain spoilers ***

The demeaning use of blindness for deep meaning is a movie called "Blindness" (2008 release, not the other movies of the same title) lost me soon after the opening scenes.

Wikipedia notes: Director Fernando Meirelles had wanted to direct a film adaptation of Blindness in 1997, perceiving it as "an allegory about the fragility of civilization".

Warning, spoilers... Fellow movie-goers, this movie is no "Lord of the Flies." Unlike "Lord of the Flies" which offers a fair, logical progression of the breakdown of civilization when there is no law, Blindness sticks all the characters in a prison, reduces the food supply, includes one inmate with a gun, and then blames all the problems of loss of civilized behavior on the inmates being blind. At a minimum, I call it "gimmick" and illogical.

Writing as one who was given the opportunity to preview this movie, I am offended by its overblown, sophomoric, and just plain inaccurate use of blindness as a metaphor for the human condition. Overblown because all but one character (a sighted wife, played by Julianne Moore) is a lost, pitiful being; sophomoric because what else can one call illogical, gratuitous nudity; and inaccurate, oh yes, quite abysmally inaccurate. In author José Saramago's equation, blindness equals loss of all common sense, and, for most of the newly blind in the movie, all their common decency too. However, Fact Check: blind people, even newly blind people, do not as a rule lose their ability to dress themselves or perform other common everyday functions, nor is blindness a reason people turn to rape or other forms of inhumanity.

Saramago's idea of what blindness does to normally intelligent people is straight out of the worst stereotypes of blindness, the ones we are supposed to have left back in the Middle Ages. Saramago even has his Medieval blind stereotypes need sight for things no person I know uses it for. For example, huge groups of his actors not knowing how to put their clothes on, an adult man not knowing how to put his trousers on, not knowing even how to wipe his behind after using the toilet.

I think of the living blind people I've seen walking down the sidewalks of my city or selling food in the cafeteria in my office building, and my friends, a married blind couple. My friends, by the way, are deeply upset, believing that this movie will make their lives more difficult if the viewing public sees this depiction as accurate. I plan to tell them not to worry. This surely will bomb at the box office the first weekend. Remember when Polish jokes were told everywhere because Polish was a byword for stupid? What makes it okay to treat blind people like this?

This is more "Waterworld" than intellectual deep thought. Remember "Waterworld" expected the audience to believe people could be living in our world that has become nearly all ocean with one lemon tree left and they would not have all died of scurvy, if not of the first good-sized storm to come along? At least the action in "Waterworld" was fun to watch. I can't say that of the physical and moral ugliness in "Blindness."

By the way, who is the audience? If I want a thriller movie, there are many more in line ahead of this one. Teenagers are unlikely to see this as a date-movie, families won't consider it, single women prefer romance and comedy, young males prefer adventure, seniors are already afraid of blindness. Who's left? Intellectuals? Maybe the same brainiacs that gave this novel a book prize and forgot a story needs some logic somewhere, even when, especially when, it is supposed to have "deep meaning" for those us who live in the real world?