'Blindness': A Deeply Compelling Story Lost in the Visuals

A man at a stoplight suddenly and without reason goes blind. He gets home with the help of a passerby, and then his wife goes blind, too. The nurse and doctor who treat him go blind hours later. So does the passerby. An epidemic and panic ensue.

Several dozen of the infected are quarantined in a deserted mental hospital, where they are guarded by a heavily armed militia that tosses in food and then runs for the barricades. Everyone inside is blind -- except the doctor's wife, who mysteriously remains immune. But the lockdown has come too late. The epidemic ravages the outside world. The people in the hospital are no longer being quarantined, they've been forgotten. No characters have a name, nor does the city, nor does the country.

This is the premise of Nobel laureate José Saramago's deeply affecting 1995 novel of the same name, which he initially did not want made into a film, but finally agreed to let the esteemed director Fernando Meirelles ("City of God," "The Constant Gardener") take on. Meirelles brings a strong but reverent hand to the project. The cast, likewise, intuits that something special is going on here. Julianne Moore is the doctor's wife, Mark Ruffalo is the doctor, Danny Glover is the old man with the eye patch and Gael García Bernal the most vicious man among the quarantined.

And then . . . and then . . . "Blindness" turns out to be an elegant car that never quite cranks up. It's fascinating to look at but not nearly so interesting to sit through. Saramago's reluctance was not misplaced. The novel's psychological and social insights, its development of character and beauty of prose are lost when they are flattened out onscreen into violence and squalor. We're missing depth, a weird little echo that keeps floating around the brain, while the movie keeps checking off its list of important plot points from the book. Mood -- that's it, too. Mood is hard to get in a visual story about mass blindness.

Not that Meirelles doesn't come close at times. He elicits excellent performances throughout, especially from Alice Braga as a blind prostitute. Cinematographer César Charlone gives us the "white blindness" of the plague. He paints the diminishing field of vision among the stricken as a pale, watery fog, like diluted white-out running across the eyeballs, and it's beautifully eerie. But then that's over, and the underlying story starts wobbling. The allegory and the plot points of a thriller start getting mixed up. The energy sputters.

Maybe this is Meirelles trying to slow himself down. "City" and "Gardener" thrived on physical movement and violent confrontation, often taking place in urban slums. The psychological landscape of the gardener in Kenya and the deadly drug dealer in Brazil are understood through their interactions with the violent world around them. They act and therefore they are defined. Charlone, who worked with him on both films, conveys that energy with jittery, nervy camerawork.

"Blindness" is a richer, denser, more complex stew of humanity. The doctor is a good man, walking through a marriage in which he and his wife seem to be passing each other on the way to somewhere else. When he wakes up the morning after treating the first victim, he's blind. (When people lose their sight, the movie tells us so via an audible ting, like a fingernail tapping crystal.) His wife accompanies him to the quarantine hospital, feigning blindness, and they quickly set up a government of elected representatives and shared responsibilities. It's like the doctor: humane, sensible.

But -- and this is where the engine starts missing -- Bernal shows up, anoints himself "King of Ward Three" and brandishes a six-shot revolver. His aide-de-camp is a lifelong blind man with a walking stick. Ward Three wants to take over the place with a reign of violence and rape. Humanity devolves into degradation and exploitation.

This sets up, in both book and film, a struggle between the decent and the depraved, and it works much better in the novel. Meirelles hits the markers of collapsing morality but in such shorthand fashion that it feels like we're reading Post-it notes stuck into the margins of Nietzsche. We watch smart people do things they know better than to do, or be so cowed by another man's assertion of will that it doesn't ring true. Why do the decent men lapse into being cowards just because they lose their sight? Why do the women become braver? Why do the coarse become nihilistic? And why does everyone forget hygiene? Do the blind really lose the ability to use a toilet? It's never clear.

The inner world of the quarantine will collapse, and some of the victims will emerge into the larger city, where dogs have begun to eat human corpses in the streets. When the doctor's wife gets caught in a scrum with a pack (I can't think of another word) of blind people over a few cans of food in a grocery store, it starts to look like too many after-the-end-of-it-all epics, with a heroine facing the morning after, the breeze stirring her hair, a smile of inner strength playing out across her lips. It had me wondering how much bleaker it could get -- and then I remembered that the cinematic take on Cormac McCarthy's "The Road" is due out later this year.

Movies can work as fable and reality. The brilliant "Pan's Labyrinth" reminded us of that. But literary novels can also stumble on the big screen, as "Love in the Time of Cholera" made painfully clear. Meirelles, a talented director, has given us a thoughtful film based on a disturbing work of art. It achieves moments of beauty, but also leaves us wanting to like it more than we actually do.

Blindness (120 minutes, at area theaters) is rated R for violence including sexual assaults, language and sexuality/nudity. It is in English with a few subtitles.