'Blindness' lacks its novel's vision

In Fernando Meirelles' land of the blind, the one-eyed man isn't king -- the morally degenerate opportunist is. After a mysterious plague of sightlessness strikes an anonymous city, a shadowy Orwellian government quarantines the afflicted in a decommissioned sanitarium, leaving them to duke it out over an ever-dwindling supply of TV dinners. Only Julianne Moore, the mousy wife of an ophthalmologist, retains her sight, but she keeps it a secret so she won't be separated from her husband (Mark Ruffalo). Gradually, she assumes leadership of the blind against the growing menace of the self-appointed "King of Ward 3" (Gael Garcia Bernal), a bartender turned petty dictator. The one-eyed man (Danny Glover) is incidental.

"Blindness" is based on a novel by the Nobel Prize-winning Portuguese author Jose Saramago, a dystopian allegory about the human condition, mass behavior in times of heightened fear and our general disinclination to see what's right in front of our eyes. The book is written in a distinctly interior style that lends it a quality at once intimate and universal. Meirelles, who also directed "City of God" and "The Constant Gardener," has attempted to convey the tone of the book by leaving the city and the characters unnamed, but it's not a gambit suited to film, where characters are observed from the outside in rather than from the inside out.

Moore has come to specialize in a particular form of Hollywood-style suffering, which she deploys again here. (The movie may be a Canadian-Brazilian-Japanese co-production, but it aims squarely for that Hollywood feel.) 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. Glover is Morgan Freeman.

Something inert and theatrical results from keeping the characters locked up when society is breaking down outside, in what would presumably be a more visual, large-scale way. Occasionally, the screen fades to a milky white that is intended to mimic what the characters experience when they lose their vision, but this has the unfortunate effect of stylizing their affliction. Director of photography Cesar Charlone's bleached-out music-video style doesn't do much for the movie's attempts at gravitas; neither does a slick and self-serious score by Marco Antonio Guimaraes. What was presumably intended to play like a fable plays, instead, like an overly long car commercial crossed with a scare-mongering public service announcement.