The daily digest of Twin Cities culture | Secrets of the City

In a recent Wall Street Journal article, Blindness director Fernando Meirelles mentions that an early screening of the movie was so upsetting some 12% of the audience walked out because of the graphic sexual violence onscreen. His response was to "soften the film a bit" because he didn't want to make a film that could possibly provoke the audience to leave. Can this be the same man that made the brilliant and unrelentingly brutal Brazilian gangster tale City of God?

Clearly Meirelles has mainstream aspirations. He wants to make big, message-heavy films in Hollywood. 2005's The Constant Gardener was not an aberration, all the more obvious with Blindness. Gardener was an effective thriller with some great performances from a strong cast, but it was a departure from the raw, visceral punch and ambition fueling City of God (it's worth noting that he co-directed God with Kátia Lund). Meirelles, I fear, has succumbed to the allure of big budgets, apparently okay with rounding off his once sharp edges.

And that's the biggest problem I have with his latest movie Blindness, and adaptation of the wonderfully grim and disturbing novel by Nobel Prize-winning Portuguese author José Saramago. The film has no bite. Well, that and Meirelles, along with screenwriter Don McKellar, have taken a thought-provoking, very cinematic book and turned it in to a colossal bore of a movie. They hit many of the notes and themes in Saramago's masterwork, but the film has no lifeblood. No soul. This is uninspired, Xerox-style filmmaking.

The movie opens just as the novel does. A man driving his car in a traffic-congested, anonymous city is suddenly stricken with a white blindness, an affliction he likens to swimming in milk. He's given a ride by a man acting as a Good Samaritan who turns out to be a thief, then brought to a doctor by his wife where he is told his eyes are fine. As bad luck would have it for everyone who came in to contact with the first blind man, this white blindness is infectious. Soon, and I mean very soon, the epidemic has spread (think 28 Days Later except in place of sprinting zombies they turn in to meandering, clumsy people who trip over things a lot) and the infected are quarantined in an abandoned hospital. The story is essentially about humanity and how quickly people will descend in to uncivilized, barbaric behavior once the idea of society is gone. This is a story where even the good people do bad things.

The characters in both the movie and book are never given names; we only know them as the Doctor (Mark Ruffalo), the Doctor's Wife (Julianne Moore) and so on. This device worked well in the book, but in cinematic form it's both implausible and kind-of silly (really, would everyone continue to refer to Ruffalo's character as "Doctor" throughout the entire period of isolation? You'd think someone would ask him his name). These characters of course represent all of humanity and thus are drawn as broad, generic archetypes, but in the novel it didn't feel so damn heavy-handed.

Meirelles works with much of his usual crew from his two previous films, and it's here where the film is most commendable. The look of Blindness is beautifully realized, very stylish (something you have to expect with a Meirelles film) and occasionally maddening. Gifted cinematographer César Charlone (nominated for an Oscar for his wonderful work on City of God) drains the film of color and shoots many scenes intentionally out of focus while often putting the subjects out of the frame. The idea is obvious, but effective, in how it puts you in the heads of the people we are following in the story. As well-done as this is, it makes for a tough watch, often keeping the viewer in the dark as to what is happening some of the time. The real achievement here is the editing done by Daniel Rezende (also deservingly nominated for City of God). His transitions and montage work here is something to behold.

A good friend of mine who recommended me the book years ago expressed his disappointment in the casting for the movie, saying the married couple-played by Moore and Ruffalo-had to be older for the story to work. I withheld judgment until I saw the movie, but now I fully agree. Moore is great here as the only person unaffected by the blindness, opting to stay with her husband and act as the surrogate mother to all the infected, but she isn't motherly enough. Ruffalo is an actor I like quite a bit (check You Can Count on Me and Zodiac for evidence of his nuanced and charming acting skills), but he's wrong for the part. Meirelles tries to make him look older by adding gray streaks in his hair, but it doesn't work. I found it hardest to accept that these two actors could play a married couple--okay in the early-going but less believable as the film carried on.

Sandra Oh was an odd and distracting choice to play a two-minute role (I'm pretty sure it was cut down significantly in the editing room) as the Minister of Health in which she's given the unfortunate task of uttering a few bad lines. I was hoping for more out of the great Gael García Bernal (Motorcycle Diaries, Y tu mamá también, Amores perros), but he is given little to do here except be the bad guy - a part he likely enjoyed playing - but his performance is rudimentary. And of course how can I forget Danny Glover, an actor who continues to put in one awful performance after another. With this, Be Kind Rewind, Shooter, and Saw I'm convinced the man should call it quits. And what's with the sudden speech impediment he has going now? His raspy voice is now mixed with some kind of lisp, making him sound as if he's talking with a mouthful of oatmeal.

Blindness was a book I enjoyed very much. I thought it would make for a great film adaptation, but now I believe it's a narrative that only works on the page; watching a cluster of blind people struggle and hurt each other for two hours doesn't exactly scream cinematic brilliance. Rarely is a book successfully adapted onto the big screen, but the films that surpass their source material--Fight Club, The Godfather, Goodfellas and Jaws come to mind--captured the book's essence while also going in to different, more cinematically appropriate directions. Blindness is faithful, but made without any of the fervor the characters in the story find in the hopeful ending it doesn't deserve.