The “unpleasant, unendurable, despairing, and sickening” movie Roger Ebert couldn’t stand
Theoretically, assembling a cast and crew of proven names with a combined back catalogue of impressive work should lead to a great movie. It doesn’t always work like that, though, as Roger Ebert discovered to his detriment.
The critic was up in arms about how badly an all-star array of names had dropped the ball, and while he wasn’t the only one, the film in question did prove to be one of the year’s most polarising releases. Some people loved it, others thought it was a tiresome slog, but none of them were as withering as Ebert.
He’d have been more thrilled than most that it bombed at the box office, which came as a surprise, given its pedigree. Hailing from City of God and The Constant Gardener‘s Academy Award-nominated director Fernando Meirelles, adapted from José Saramago’s Nobel Prize-winning novel, and starring Oscar nominees Mark Ruffalo and Julianne Moore in the lead roles, 2008’s Blindness felt like surefire awards bait.
It always felt like a tricky book to adapt for the screen, with the story zeroing in on a city that suddenly suffers an epidemic of white blindness, causing life as everyone knows it to instantly fall into chaos and disrepair. That’s not to say it was guaranteed to suck, not that Ebert did a great job of hiding his dissatisfaction with almost everything about it.
“Blindness is one of the most unpleasant, not to say unendurable, films I’ve ever seen,” he opened his 1.5-star review. “It is an allegory about a group of people who survive under great stress, but frankly, I would rather have seen them perish than sit through the final three-quarters of the film. Not only is it despairing and sickening, it’s ugly.”
Ebert seemed most pissed off by how badly Blindness failed to live up to the sum of its parts, acknowledging that something from a director, author, and ensemble cast with such impressive credentials should have at least been semi-watchable, not the flaming dumpster fire of cinema he was greeted with.
“I learn he long resisted offers to make his book into a movie,” he said in reference to Saramago finally being worn down by the Hollywood machine. “Not long enough.” It was an ambitious experiment to film the allegedly, or perhaps accurately, unfilmable and try to convey the feeling of blindness to an audience, but suffice to say, Ebert was of the belief that Mereilles did a terrible job.
Laying into the narrative for being “nothing but symbols and metaphors” and an ear-pounding soundtrack composed by Brazilian instrumentalists Uatki as being “so aggressive I was cringing in my seat,” he had absolutely nothing positive to say about Blindness. He wasn’t alone, even if the picture’s polarising nature also saw it shortlisted for the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival.
The writing may have been on the wall when almost 50 people walked out of the first test screening, and even though the director returned to the editing suite in a futile attempt to make things more palatable for a mass audience, Ebert would be the first to say he didn’t succeed.
