The Unrecognized Zombie-ness of Blindness

Jose Saramago's best-known novel Blindness—also his most dumbed-down, if you ask me—poses a single, chilling question: what if an entire city abruptly and inexplicably goes blind? Though the story reverts to allegorical coddling on par with Heart of Darkness (metaphor! juxtaposition! OMG, I get it!), Saramago's linguistic dexterity makes the book a begrudgingly good read.

While he spoon-feeds Gerber-approved symbolism and satire, the Nobel Prize-winner's disregard for basic punctuation and grammar means that you rarely know which character is talking or thinking at any given time. Sure, page-long sentences and quotation-less dialogue may sound exhausting, but the technique is actually one of the most effectively disorienting characteristics of the book—begging the question of how and why anyone would try to translate it into a movie.

That Fernando Meirelles—the man behind feel-good =flicks like City of God and The Constant Gardener—eventually convinced Senhor Saramago to sell him the film rights is most likely a testament to the Brazilian director's decade of persistent badgering more so than the author's confidence in the novel's cinema-translatability. But, sure enough, the movie was made, and just as surely it failed to engage audiences during its blink-and-you-missed-it release.

Contagion, containment, violence, and total social breakdown—these are the touchstones I relish in the films of George A. Romero and his undead-obsessed brethren, but which end up feeling preachy and contrived in Meirelles' otherwise adept hands. In the absence of Saramago's literary fluency, Blindnessthemovie ends up feeling like a zombie movie without the gross-out benefit of actual zombies.

Now, I'm not one to snob all over every book-to-movie adaptation, so here's why it's actually worth seeing (no pun intended). The angelic quality of the doctor's wife (played by Julienne Moorein a pseudo-Children of Men repeat) is visually amplified by her wardrobe, hair color, and ethereal glow. Furthermore, the "white blindness" itself is hauntingly mimicked by washed-out lighting and admittedly gorgeous camerawork. And, of course, the contemporary setting makes the story more resonant than the nondescript location and era of the book. That these "pros" hinge on the paradoxically visual nature of the movie, only emphasizes the blatant misunderstanding of the story itself—but, hey, we're trying to be positive here.

If hypothetical horror is you're thing, then you'd be better off just reading Saramago's similarly fantastical but much more entertaining The Stone Raft, in which the Iberian Peninsula suddenly drifts off into the Atlantic Ocean, or The History of the Siege of Lisbon, which explores the consequences of altering a single word in a history book.