Vision quest

THE post-Cannes buzz on Fernando Meirelles's Blindness was much harsher than I expected, given that the director's two previous features, City of God and The Constant Gardener, were almost universally overpraised. So it was a surprise to discover Blindness is not only much better than many critics have claimed but easily superior to anything Meirelles has done before. That said, without Gardener's dashing romance or God's blighted tykes, audiences may be trickier to persuade.

Long believed unfilmable, Nobel laureate José Saramago's 1995 novel unfolds in a city gripped by a mysterious epidemic of sightlessness. An obvious allegory for urban isolation and anonymity, the novel flows on long, hypnotic sentences that are both poetic and cerebral as well as difficult to shape into a traditional screenplay. The challenge for Meirelles was considerable, and not limited to choreographing characters -- all of whom are unnamed and all but one of whom is blind -- required to blunder into one another at regular intervals. Rehearsals must have resembled a McCain campaign strategy meeting.

From the outset, however, Meirelles and his screenwriter, Don McKellar, exhibit a remarkably firm grip on their apocalyptic material. When a driver loses his sight in inner-city traffic, the filmmakers create a nerve-jangling cacophony of horns, curses and wildly flashing traffic lights to underscore his confusion. And when the terrified soul is rescued by a friendly stranger (played by the versatile McKellar) -- who will turn out to be less than a good samaritan -- the rescue evolves into a seesaw of apprehension and relief, immediately establishing the moral jungle that's about to prevail.

As the plague spreads, accompanied by mass hysteria and official confusion, we follow a small group of the infected to quarantine in a dilapidated prison. An ophthalmologist (Mark Ruffalo), his strong-willed wife (Julianne Moore) -- who is hiding the fact that she can see in order to remain with her husband -- and several of his patients form the nucleus of a haphazard family and attempt to organize their ward. Food supplies are erratic, medicine is unobtainable and the jumpy guards are alternately trigger-happy and bored. Conditions and morals rapidly deteriorate; unable to see the filth beneath their feet and the behavior of their peers, everyone but Moore is as helpless as a motherless infant.

Occasionally grueling and aesthetically courageous, Blindness is a slow slide of social disintegration that can feel at times like a war of competing metaphors. When a rival ward, organized by a power-crazy bartender (Gael García Bernal) and an old creep who's been blind since birth (Maury Chaykin), gains control of the food supply and demands payment -- first in valuables, then women -- the principles of democracy versus dictatorship are too obviously up for debate. But while the story begs for quotes from Hobbes and Machiavelli, Meirelles never gets bogged down in philosophy or politics; his harrowing scenes of human cruelty and desperation are simply too visceral to intellectualize.

Like an urban Lord of the Flies, Blindness is a morality tale rendered cinematic by visual daring and simmering performances. Moore is marvelous as the movie's selfless heart and steely resolve -- its savior in more ways than one. With bleached-out hair and paper-pale skin, she seems to bleed into the film's whited-out color scheme as though a product of the plague itself: infected yet asymptomatic. Like Cormac McCarthy's The Road, Blindness places human beings at the far limits of their experience and watches as they fend for themselves. It's not a pretty sight.