Blindness.

"Perhaps a decent film couldn't have been made from Jose Saramago's Blindness," suggests Eric Hynes at indieWIRE. "If one were to insist on adapting the text, why in the world would one ignore its central aesthetic challenge? Similar to stage-to-film transfers that "open up" action with camera movements that distract from a scene's point of being (Proof, Hurlyburly among others), Fernando Meirelles's Blindness strains to visualize lack of vision."

Fernando F Croce in Slant: "It's too easy a joke to say that Blindness lacks vision; more accurate to say that it lacks control, lucidity and humanity, the last being a particularly calamitous absence in a film about civilization in crisis."

Updated through 10/3.

"Unflinching at best and treacly at worst, the film unveils its apocalyptic scenario with visceral intensity, but lacks the emotional sophistication to rise above schadenfreude kicks," writes Anthony Kaufman in the Voice.

"Blindness is high-wire filmmaking, and its bold strokes will strike some as insufferably moralistic," concedes Sam Adams in the Philadelphia City Paper. "But Meirelles and [screenwriter Don] McKellar don't make easy judgments, or stock their world with sneering villains and plaster saints. (McKellar, who envisioned a similar scenario in his own film Last Night, casts himself as an irredeemable sleazebag.) The movie is a lament, not a jeremiad, a cry of despair tempered with a note of frail hope."

"Hardly the laugher suggested by festival word-of-mouth, Blindness is still white elephant art par excellence, a weighty international coproduction adapting a Nobel laureate, lumberingly respectful to its source without being particularly receptive to it." Mark Asch in the L Magazine.

"The trouble with Blindness is that it's so preoccupied with shouldering [its] symbolic weight that it gradually forgets to tell a story - to keep faith with the directives of common sense," argues Anthony Lane in the New Yorker.

"The seriousness of the situation, particularly the squalor of the living conditions, is clear enough," writes Duncan Shepherd in the San Diego Reader. "The drama of it is blurred."

In the Independent Weekly, David Fellerath finds it "little more than earnest moralizing that asks us to wring our hands as we see how horrid people become in the absence of order."

"Who'd guess that Miracle at St Anna wasn't the worst film of the week?" Armond White in the New York Press: "That honor goes to Fernando Meirelles's Blindness."

Updates, 10/3: "Fernando Meireilles's 2003 breakthrough film, City of God, was a discomfiting masterpiece, a sad tale of children killing children in the slums of Rio de Janeiro that was also one of the most ferociously stylish, entertaining films of the last decade," writes the New Republic's Christopher Orr. "His 2005 follow-up, The Constant Gardener, was very nearly the opposite: a somewhat silly global conspiracy thriller with a presentation as high-toned and laborious as a brochure from the World Health Organization. I don't know whether Meireilles intended the latter film to serve as penance for the giddiness of the former, but if so it seems he is, alas, still trying to make amends. His latest film, Blindness, makes The Constant Gardener look like, well, City of God."

"[T]he characters in Mr Meirelles's film may be ciphers, as they are in the mechanical universe of Mr Saramago's novel, but they are also Julianne Moore, Mark Ruffalo, Alice Braga," writes AO Scott in the New York Times. "And this simple fact makes a big difference. Mr Saramago's lofty, ideologically defended humanism has no place for actual human beings, but actors of this caliber don't know how to be anything else."

"Meirelles adds little to Saramago's notions of fascism or divine salvation, and every nightmarish moment contends with images of characters tripping over each other like Keystone Kops," writes David Fear in Time Out New York. "Blindness lets you clearly see the author's notions of humankind at its worst, yet the book's poetry is nowhere in sight."

"Moore has come to specialize in a particular form of Hollywood-style suffering, which she deploys again here," writes Carina Chocano in the Los Angeles Times. "But the dry-lipped pallor and tragedy-mask pain ring hollow in a movie driven by ideas rather than emotion. Other actors seem hamstrung by their roles as allegorical figures, at times seeming to be awkwardly standing around representing things. Ruffalo is Ironic Obliviousness. Alice Braga, playing a call girl in dark glasses, is Anonymous Carnality. The little boy played by Mitchell Nye is Innocence. [Danny] Glover is Morgan Freeman."

"In the course of two hours that crawl by like four and a half, Meirelles and his valiant but floundering cast stage a morality play whose message is thus: We've become so disconnected from ourselves as human beings that we can't even see one another." Stephanie Zacharek in Salon: "Faced with hardship and illness - in this case, a plague that causes its victims to go blind within minutes - humans aren't likely to band together; instead, they turn against one another, their worst instincts coming to the fore. Only when they accept that cooperation, kindness and a sense of community make life worth living do they regain a chance of 'seeing' again, which is a good thing, because at least it stops them from bumbling around and declaring, 'I'm blind!' and 'I can't see!' As we used to say on the playground: No shit, Sherlock."

"[S]tyle and substance are both ample," writes Scott Tobias at the AV Club. "They're just at odds with one another, as director Fernando Meirelles piles on a host of visual gimmicks, no doubt intending to suggest the intense disorientation of those newly inflected with 'white blindness.' But the effect of his aggressive language - the extremely shallow focus, the heavenly whites and blurry blacks, the jagged editorial ellipses - are a major distraction from what might have been a timely and politically loaded tale of society on the brink."

"Blindness bleeds seriousness and lofty intentions from its every frame, but it's a didactic bore," writes Alonso Duralde at MSNBC. "But hey, it's Oscar season, so it's probably just one of many more of those to come."

Posted by dwhudson at October 2, 2008 2:14 PM