The Men Who Stare at Goats - % % % %

My web-review was selected as part of the Rotten Tomattoes Show on CurrentTV episode airing on Nov. 13, 2009, which was very exciting for me.

You can find it on the Rotten Tomatoes Show's website.

And here's the complete review I submitted to them.

Blindness - % % %

While this is an interesting concept, the entire world suffers from a contagious disease that induces a form of blindness, the execution fails at points and the dismal view of the ensuing conflict hits a few false notes. In the end, following how society breaks down is always an interesting exercise and I was engaged until the end.

The main characters are a couple played by Mark Ruffalo and Juliane Moore. Ruffalo plays an optometrist, who the first victim visits for help. Moore plays his wife and from the first scene with them together we are to infer that she is a neglected and shy housewife, and that their marriage is not filled with passion or much warmth. If their relationship had been better developed in the beginning, it might have made the rest of the film more engaging than an exercise in curiosity. Ruffalo does a descent job showing his character's struggles and emotional complexities, but Moore fails to connect with the audience's sympathy as she forges on, bearing enormous responsibilities without any joys or pleasures. She suffers in silence and when she does fall to tears, it has no power, but reminds me of other scenes from Boogie Nights and Magnolia when her tears affected me deeply. Here she feels too distant, drowned out by the extraordinary spectacle of an entire society collapsing around her.

The film is set in an unnamed urban location with unnamed characters. The execution of this is excellent and the feeling of a multicultural metropolis is achieved with remarkable skill by director Fernando Meirelles. Much of the film is in gray tones, and through glass and steel and mirrors, we see the civilization fall apart. Immediately the sick are quarantined in substandard facilities with no staff to attend to the newly blind. They are herded in and abandoned to care for themselves with occaisional deliveries of food. The film gets very dark very quickly. As the hoards of new victims enter the facilities the lack of institutional structure leads to a de-evolution in the small society.
A man (Gael Garcia Bernal) declares himself king and his male dominated wing take control of the food supply. They demand all the valuables from the others in exchange and then they demand the women. The decent into this abhorrent anarchy forces questions into one's mind, attempting to find ways out of this situation. But these means and avenues are not fully explored and the violence is not convincing enough to accept the plot at this point. The consequences do feel natural and a final twist brings the entire situation crumbling to ashes.

At this point the few characters we have come to know form a small family who exit the facility into a totally abandoned and collapsed city. The world has fallen apart and much of the city is abandoned to roaming and staggering groups of the blind. After the first section of the film, the silence and sparseness feels a great relief. What could feel long and drawn out, is a fine easing of the tension into the final resolution. I commend the filmmakers for restraining themselves. In another film, like City of Men, it could be one trauma after another. In Blindness however, the destruction leads to silent scavengering and eventually to the creation of a refuge. The happy ending is earned, although leads this audience member to question the purpose of the exercise in the first place. If it all works out in the end, did the couple and their accompanying new family need to suffer through all of this to find a real appreciation for family? Is that the value in this epic journey? Perhaps if the villains had been better developed psychologically, I might come to feel more confident that loving and caring for one another is the true answer. But since this is based on a Jose Saramago novel, I am not surprised that there is little character development. In this translation into a two hour film, the story might have been aided by a bit more standard psychological development. Saramago can get away with nameless characters because we can enter their heads and read their thoughts slowly over the course of several hundred pages. In a film, a bit more is required to understand how a man can become so cruel and selfish, and if it is that he is simply selfish that makes him cause so much evil, as in Bernal's character.