A World Gone Blind

It is also a flawed one. A rushed edit was screened at the 2008 Cannes film festival, to mixed reviews and complaints that it relied too much on a clunky voice-over. So Meirelles wisely eliminated most of the voice-over. But other problems remain. The opening sequence, depicting people in a hectic city spontaneously going blind, which plays so powerfully on the page, proves jarring on screen. The eminently talented Mexican actor Gael García Bernal relishes his role as the budding asylum dictator, but the character is too archetypal to be convincing. (It is underwritten in the novel as well.) And many moments of weighty contemplation in the book are sacrificed for efficient cinematic narrative, shortchanging Saramago's work.

But people looking for more can always read the novel. The film is an example of gutsy and ambitious risk taking of a sort that is all too rare. Held together by deft central performances (especially by Moore and Mark Ruffalo, who plays her husband) and propelled by Meirelles's elegant visual storytelling, the movie is well worth enduring some imperfections to spend time in Saramago's richly rendered universe. Meirelles now says he's glad that Saramago refused to sell the film rights in the late 1990s. "It would have been my first feature," he says, "and I think I wasn't prepared [emotionally] to do that film." Those who are emotionally prepared to watch it can only hope to learn its lessons before some form of blindness reaches them.

© 2008