The 'Blindness' of Translating Saramago's Book to the Screen
I took a break from my [summer reading list] to catch up with Jose Saramago's [Blindness](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blindness_(novel)) before [Fernando Meirelles](http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0576987/#director)' film adaptation comes out this September. Meirelles' last two films earned him much well-deserved praise[City of God](http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0317248/) is easily one of the most striking contemporary cinematic epics and [The Constant Gardener](http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0387131/) had plenty of sharp acting and smart thrillsbut early word from Cannes about his adaptation of [Blindness](www.blindness-themovie.com) was lukewarm at best. The NY Times' Manohla Dargis called it a "[nasty, brutish and nowhere near short enough](http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/16/movies/16cann.html?_r=1&oref=slogin)" while our own Eric Kohn said that it "[paved the way for other duds](/21/22/film/erickohn.cfm)," since it was the opening night film at this year's festival.
Nevertheless, my curiosity got the better of me. I reasoned that it would at least be a good book and a bad movie. After all, Saramago's novel has accrued a towering reputationin. [NY Times' Book Review critic and novelist, Andrew Miller], wrote that "[Saramago is the most tender of writers. . .[he has] a quality that can only honestly be termed wisdom](http://www.nytimes.com/books/98/10/04/reviews/981004.04millert.html)" and, oh yeah, it won him the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1998.
I finished it today after a little more than a week of reading and, frankly, I'm still not sure how I feel. Saramago is an undeniably compelling storyteller, but his propensity for aphorisms and conventional wisdom gets cumbersome incredibly quickly. As an allegory, it's too tricky to easily swallow or break down, which is infinitely better than if Saramago had turned the novel's existential apocalypse into a Judeo-Christian allegory. By the end, however, it doesn't really add up to much more than a long, sensual trip with a smugly cryptic resolution at journey's end.
It was already [adapted into a not very good stage play] that premiered last year Off-Broadway, and to adapt the novel into a film, Meirelles will have to upset the delicate balance Saramago achieves between the protagonists' immediate problems (ie: bodily functions!) and the philosophical quandary their sudden blindness presents. He'll either have to amp up the story's considerable tension or drown it by overemphasizing the book's tangled and often ponderous meditations on the human condition.
It's a problem that the Coen brothers' struggled with in their award-winning adaptation of Cormac McCarthy's [No Country for Old Men]. While about two-thirds of the novel focuses Lleweyln Moss' (Josh Brolin) bloody race to get away from Anton Chigurh (Javier Bardem), the other third sleepily picks up the pieces and teases out what it all means.
For the most part, the Coens' smartly boil down the elegiac and the mysterious explanatory parts of McCarthy's novel to their essence and spread them throughout the chase. For better or wrose, the film doesn't have nearly as much cryptic, pontificating dialogue as the novel. Chigurh doesn't talk as much in the movie as he does in the novel and neither does the hangdog Sheriff Bell (Tommy Lee Jones), whose musings make up the bulk of the "what it all means" portion of the novel.
The film sinks in a few crucial points, namely when the Coens' depict scenes where Bell wonders just what the heck is happening almost exactly how McCarthy wrote them. Bell's final soliliquoy is particularly enervating in the film, wrapping up an otherwise astonishig feat of visual storytelling with a mumble instead of a bold question mark.
Likewise, imagining a cinematic answer to Blindness' moral center--its garrulous and almost omniscient narrator--seems impossible. The story of a well-wishing group of victims of the mysterious "white blindness" is as much about their everyday lives as it is about how they shield themselves from the mental strain of wondering what comes next. In the novel, the narrator tenuously juggles the characters' intellectual and visceral travails, speaking through a uniquely literary voice that is just as bubbling with uncertainty and lingering questions as the protagonists are.
Visualizing the protagonists' inner world is an especially difficult task because, unlike, No Country, it's metaphysical malaise is one whose nature is impossible not to broach. Anton Chigurh is an unholy terror but Sheriff Bell's explanations can be easily excised without the layman wondering why. On the other hand, to leave open a question mark as big as a plague of sudden white blindness would be impossible. It would turn the story into a variation on the zombie films that [George Romero] made his reputation with and reduce a sometimes too solemn for its own good allegory to titilating social critique.
Judging on the reviews from Cannes, it sounds like Meirelles did just that, visually overcompensating and shedding little light on the characters' plight outside of their immediate trials--Dargis remarked, "Mr. Meirelles also has to flood the screen with a sizzling (blinding) white, which causes your pupils to constrict. Thats a cool enough trick the first five or six times, but it grows wearisome when you realize that Mr. Meirelles is capable only of bopping the audience on the head, not engaging whats inside those heads."
It's little comfort that Meirelle's doesn't cop out and try to have a voiceover narrator explain everything away. Still, whether or not he overdoes it for my money has yet to be (Please, oh please, pardon me for this pun) seen.