'Blindness' a tight, gripping story

In the land of the blind, the visionary director is king.

With "Blindness," Brazilian director Fernando Meirelles, the mind behind "City of God" and "The Constant Gardener," tells a tight, gripping story about a populace overtaken by sudden blindness. He opens the film with a tense scene in which a driver, suddenly having lost his sight, stops his car and holds up traffic -- one askew gear causing the whole system to collapse.

A passerby offers to drive the man home, then robs him, only to find that he, too, has gone blind.

Meirelles aims to show humanity at its cruelest and least restrained. He means to imagine what might happen if all the niceties of culture were stripped away, and everyone -- rich, poor, fat, thin, unattractive and pretty -- was equalized, left with fragile virtues buckling under the pressure to survive.

The movie makes you appreciate the gift of sight, not only because its characters are incapacitated, but because the film is so beautiful in its depiction of ugliness.

Cinematographer Cesar Charlone is inventive, his shots ranging from oversaturated with whiteness to distorted silhouettes and double exposures. He was nominated for an Oscar for "City of God" (the award went to Russell Boyd for "Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World") and will be in the running again.

Based on the novel by Nobel Prize winner Jose Saramago, "Blindness" is a disturbing tale of a city afflicted by a spontaneous, rapidly spreading illness that causes people to go blind. Authorities quarantine the afflicted, including the unnamed protagonists, an eye doctor (Mark Ruffalo) and his wife (Julianne Moore), the one person who keeps her vision.

The plot blends the mass epidemic of "The Happening" with the anarchic struggles of "28 Days Later." Armed guards keep the afflicted locked in small rooms at gunpoint, indifferent to the squalor and festering injuries that afflict the inmates. One of the captives (Gael Garcia Bernal) sets himself as a despot, seizing control of the food supply, making increasingly brutal demands of his subjects.

The Moore character, who pretends she's blind in order to stay with her husband, becomes the impromptu caretaker of her roommates. She guides people down corridors, helps set up touchstones to let people better find their way and plots an uprising against the tormenters.

Her husband devolves from a confident decision-maker to a coward who wilts at the first sign of adversity. He's no help to Moore's character, who begins to break down after absorbing the problems of the others and being unable to protect all those who need her help.

So rich is the material and its implications, you could probably watch the film several times and come away with different metaphorical readings. Moore may be a biblical prophet, helping her people through a supernatural plague. Or a political leader, desperate to lend her vision to a stumbling populace. Or maybe it's that the blind are gifted, and Moore's vision acts only as a handicap that will ensure her own ruin.

"Blindness" confidently trots out such stimulating topics, daring you to wrestle with them in the dark.

3.5 stars out of 4

Rated: R for violence including sexual assaults, language and sexuality/nudity.

Family call: Not for kids.

Running time: 120 minutes.

(Pvillarreal(at)azstarnet.com.)

(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, www.scrippsnews.com.)