So far this has been an excellent decade for village explainers, that tribe that eternally strives to get the rest of us to understand, among other things, that if religion does not answer to logic and physical science, it does not deserve to exist—that it is, in fact, the root of most man-made evil. If the twentieth century, with its atheistic mass murderers, was a bad time for the explainers, 9/11 and the mutual devastations of Sunni and Shiites gave them a fresh claim on the public forum.
Religulous may make Bill Maher the best-known village explainer on the planet. Its opening scene clearly sums up the comedian’s fears about organized religion. In the Bible, he points out, it is God alone who can destroy the earth, but now, with powerful weapons in the hands of religious fanatics (and Maher might lump George W. Bush in with the worst of the president’s foes), those who believe in “the end of days” or other such apocalyptic notions may be able to fulfill such prophecies. Therefore, or so Maher says, he and his director, Larry Charles, traveled around the world with a camera crew for the sake of talking with, and understanding, those who are ridiculous enough to be religious.
Actually, Maher makes no attempt whatsoever to understand the grounds of religious belief. He simply seeks out (mostly) ridiculous people (creationists, some guy claiming to be the direct descendant of Christ, another trying to “cure” homosexuals with Scripture) who have some hand in a religious enterprise (I use the word deliberately since some are making money out of religion). He makes monkeys out of them, either by eliciting stupid statements or intercutting their nonsense with clips from silly religious-propaganda TV movies or Hollywood epics, or by printing captions beside the talking heads to identify lies, inaccuracies, and even errors in diction. So there’s no real inquiry here, just mockery of the most ham-fisted sort.
To be fair to the unfair, there’s a streak of honesty in Maher that competes with his smugness. Although he despises his childhood religion, Roman Catholicism, as much as other faiths, he includes two interviews that at least allow viewers to see that some believers aren’t “religulous.” Fr. Reginald Foster, a senior Vatican scholar, has the gusto of a Falstaff as he distinguishes the essentials of his faith from the inessentials (prophets swallowed by fish, December 25 being passed off as the birth date of Christ). The astonished (and perhaps delighted) Maher tries to call Foster a “maverick,” but the priest good-naturedly blows the label off.
I particularly admire Maher for including the interview with George Coyne, former director of the Vatican Observatory, because that scientist demonstrates in a few sentences why empirical proof and spiritual belief dwell in separate intellectual universes and can’t answer each other, much less threaten each other. To their credit, Maher listens respectfully and Larry Charles records faithfully, even though what Coyne has to say blows the Religulous project to pieces.
To sketch the plot of Blindness is to evoke the portentous word “allegory.” A bustling, nameless city populated by bustling, nameless people (doesn’t all this namelessness guarantee that we are looking at an allegory?) is stricken with a plague: sudden, random sightlessness. Even though the victims are beginning to outnumber the spared, the government herds the blind into squalid detention centers to isolate the infection (but is it an infection?). Guarded by panicky soldiers, and demoralized by filth, most of the inmates in one building try to maintain a semblance of civilization but are undermined by others who turn to thievery, rape, and tyranny. The predators are empowered by possessing the only firearm in the place. No one can aim the revolver but, if shot at random, it will sooner or later wound someone, so it compels obedience. But, unknown to victimizers and victims alike, one of the inmates can still see and has entered the prison only to tend her blind husband. Her sight might be a weapon of defense, but how will she choose to use it?
The cruel chanciness of the affliction suggests Camus and Kafka, the deterioration of morality under isolated conditions recalls Lord of the Flies, while the governmental cruelty can’t help but remind us of Guantánamo and Abu Ghraib. So, if it walks like an allegory and quacks like an allegory, isn’t Blindness an allegory?
Well, yes. But what is memorable about this movie—and much of it is unforgettable—has nothing to do with allegory. The Brazilian director Fernando Meirelles has used José Saramago’s novel (the screenplay is by the Canadian writer-director Don McKellar, who appears in the movie) to create a visual experience that deliberately undermines its audience, makes viewers share the powerlessness of the victims in a visceral way, stirs them to want to fight back with the fictional victims but also lets them realize the difficulty of how to go about it. Never before while watching a movie have I felt so rebellious and helpless simultaneously. And it isn’t grappling with symbolism that brings about this state of mind, but sheer cinematic skill. A skill that never stoops to cheap tricks.
Only once does Meirelles make the screen go completely black to mimic the affliction. After all, utter blackness doesn’t capture the condition of the main character, the sighted wife played by Julianne Moore. But she lives, walks, labors, sleeps, and suffers amid blindness, is inundated with it. So the director subtly, gradually, drains the screen of color, uses streaks and patches of white light at odd moments to menace our confidence in our own vision, moves the camera so close to the skin of the actors that we find ourselves studying their pores and the fine, tiny hairs on Moore’s arms. In one scene, a shot of a character walking across an empty room suddenly lap-dissolves into another shot of the same room from the same angle, only now a chair has popped out of nowhere to collide with the blind person. During the scenes of rape, Meirelles uses darkness to cover the action—not to spare us the brutality but to make us confront ourselves with the knowledge of the horror happening in the dark. Since our view of the action is obscured, our hearing instinctively sharpens, and the voices of predators and victims make the cruelty inescapable.
Julianne Moore has often brought too high a gloss to her characters, making them inhumanly stylish. Here she conveys the wife’s suffering and courage with powerful directness, and her angular beauty and nerviness combine to create an authentic heroine.
With his City of God, Fernando Meirelles gave us one of the three best film dramas of the decade so far (the others being Brokeback Mountain and There Will Be Blood). Blindness, necessarily narrower in scope and trickier in execution, isn’t on that level, but is nevertheless remarkable. Be warned, parts of it are punishing. Be brave: See it.
