“Blindness” to be a Movie

Filed Under books, movies, people, quotes

I’m not quite sure what to think yet. One of my favorite novels, Blindness, is being adapted to the big screen. The cast list has me scratching my chin - it includes Julianne Moore, Mark Ruffalo, Sandra Oh, Danny Glover, and Gael Garcia Bernal. The inclusion of North Americans puzzles me a little as the writer, José Saramago, is Portuguese, and his stories tend to be set in nameless Iberian countries.

But … it could be good. The premise - in case you’re wondering by this time - is this: a man on his way home from work or wherever is sitting in his car at a light, when all of the sudden he goes blind. Of course, he cannot drive so he is assisted to his home by another man. The man who went blind visits the doctor, who isn’t sure what’s going on. But very soon after, the doctor goes blind. The blind man’s wife goes blind. Pretty soon many people have inexplicably gone blind, and the government starts housing them all in an unused asylum. And then we see what happens to people in these situations, and what becomes of society as more and more people lose their sight.

Back to the film: The director, Fernando Meirelles - also Portuguese - is responsible for City of God and The Constant Gardener. Oh my god - two films that can grind even a stone heart into sand for an hourglass. I’ve only a little exposure to the screenwriter Don McKellar. He is a Canadian, who seems to travel (at least some of the time) within this circle of excellent and interesting Canadian actors and directors like Egoyan, Cronenberg, Sarah Polley, and Oh. He made the indie film, Last Night, which I thought was … okay. In general, I find Canadian films made by this group of people to feel slightly frozen. I like them, but the characters always seem to be in the midst of thawing.

Maybe something truly remarkable will be the result when these two Portuguese and Canadian sensibilities are mixed. The novel itself gives the experience of being rent from a long distance. Saramago is magical that way.

This afternoon I skimmed through some of the book, rereading underlined passages. It’s a challenge to quote Saramago because his “sentences” are the length of paragraphs, while his paragraphs are the length of chapters; his humor is difficult to take out of context, and the dialogue is not separated from the narrative. But here are a couple of excerpts that I like:

…The good and the evil resulting from our words and deeds go on apportioning themselves, one assumes in a reasonably uniform and balanced way, throughout all the days to follow, including those endless days, when we shall not be here to find out, to congratulate ourselves or ask for pardon, indeed there are those who claim that this is the much-talked-of immortality ….

… She did not waste time asking herself where such a thought had come from, she was only surprised at its slowness, at how the first word had been so slow in appearing, the slowness of those to follow, and how she found that the thought was already there before, somewhere or other, and only the words were missing, like a body searching in the bed for the hollow that had been prepared for it by the mere idea of lying down.

… animals are like people, they get used to everything in the end.

That last one reminded me of something Dostoevsky wrote in another of my favorite pieces of fiction, House of the Dead, - “Man is a creature who can get used to anything, and I believe that is the very best way of defining him.”

There are many days when I think this is true. In Blindness, Saramago offers a great parable.