Mark Ruffalo shares something in common with the rest of us who didn’t get an invite to Cannes. He too didn’t see the cut of Blindness that premiered there and had many critics ballyhooing about an intrusive voice-over narrator.
The film’s apologetic director, Fernando Merielles, explained during a roundtable interview at the Toronto International Film Festival that even he didn’t see the dreaded early cut until the actual premiere. The truly international co-production was still having post-production done in Canada, Brazil, and Japan, and it was rushed for opening night at Cannes.
Many of the film’s wrinkles have been ironed out, culminating in a harrowing allegory about a world gone blind. Ruffalo is excited (he’s actually bouncing in his seat) about the implications it has on the political chaos we’re currently facing. He points to gas prices, the economic crisis, the war in Iraq, and with ironic wit—a black presidential candidate.
Ruffalo is a political shaker, and he’s captivated by the idea that society is like a house of cards. All you need to do is remove one for everything to come crashing down. That’s the essence of Blindness.
“[Civilization] is a construct in a sense,” Ruffalo’s co-star Julianne Moore concurs. “People feel like it’s all in place for a reason—that it’s been there and there’s somebody in charge. But there isn’t. We’re the only ones in charge. We’re the ones that put these governments in order.”
“It’s like money. What we think is so valuable is just paper, and it’s paper with a so-called promise behind it. We’ve managed to agree that this amount of paper equals this amount of labour. There’s nothing behind it. Isn’t that a scary idea?”
Moore has been taken aback by the intense questions the film has inspired among journalists. “With some [junkets] you get lots of ‘What was it like to work with so and so?,’” she explains of her regular press duties. But with this film she has to describe how she would solve current global issues.
These challenging questions seem due course for such a complicated film, fraught with problems long before the Cannes premiere. The first issue to resolve was how to commit Nobel Laureate Jose Saramago’s novel to film, an inherently visual medium. Merielles acquits himself admirably with a bleached aesthetic that often looks more imagined than seen.
Then there were the actors, who had to pretend they couldn’t see. “I think they had a bigger challenge,” admits Moore, who managed to avoid the blindness boot camp, as her character has the benefit of retaining her sense of sight. Ruffalo recalls how tormenting it was to constantly forsake his own sight—to ignore what he sees and not get caught looking.
“I spent a lot of time reassuring them,” says Moore, who admits that like her character, she ended up a leader among the actors, guiding them along the way. “They were terrified of being blind!”
