Blindness
Blindness focuses on dwellers of an anonymous city (Guelph Ontario) that after casual contact with one another are stricken by an unexplainable loss of vision and all of a sudden it’s Lord of the Flies time. Mark Ruffalo plays one of the characters all of whom are deliberately nameless. He’s an optometrist who treats the first person stricken by the contagious sightlessness that plunges its victims not into total darkness but total whiteness. In no time anyone that he has had contact with is in the dark (or should I say light) and that includes the doctor but for some unexplained reason not the doctors wife (Julianne Moore). A myopic government has a jackboot solution for the spreading virus. With concentration camp logic they isolate the afflicted in some secure but long abandoned institution. As the facility becomes overcrowded democracy breaks down. When a bartended (Gael García Bernal) shows up with a gun and teams up with an accountant (Toronto’s Maury Chaykin) who is blind from birth and feeling mad with power in his suddenly advantageous position, tyranny becomes the rule of law. Our point of view always gravitates to the sphere of influence of the doctor and his wife, a small group that includes a man with an eye patch (Danny Glover) and a thief played by Canada’s always excellent Don McKeller. While some stress out because of their disability some actually come to relish their new condition. This stylish Canadian co-production goes on a little long but goes a long way to not looking Canadian as it deals with the breakdown of civility when a major crisis begets anarchy.