Though many screenwriters have spoken of the hardships involved in bringing a beloved novel to theatres, few have ever visited an original author in what can only be described as a lair poised on the top of a volcano in the Canary Islands. Don McKellar, the adaptor of Jose Saramego’s Nobel Prize-winning novel, Blindness, did exactly this while trying to secure the rights to make the film, which is opening at the Calgary International Film Festival’s opening gala on Thursday, September 18. While Saramego was initially resistant to the idea of a film adaptation, McKellar eventually convinced him, then sabotaged the death ray at the heart of the volcano and escaped by hang glider. The last part of that sentence has not been fact checked.
“It was sort of exciting, because it was this crazy mission, like the beginning of some movie, going off on some hopeless mission,” says McKellar. “We really had nothing to lose, because he had already refused us, but it was really exciting to succeed. But it was also a huge responsibility, because his main concern was that we would lose control. It wasn’t even creative. As it turned out, it had more to do with his mistrust of the movie industry. It was a huge weight on my shoulders. But now the film is No. 1 in Brazil, so he just sent me a congratulatory note, and I’m very happy.”
The conceit of Blindness is that the whole world — suddenly and without explanation — goes blind, and the action demonstrates how utterly civilization fails to cope with the disaster. Those first afflicted are rounded up and put in asylums, and the degradation of society and morality that’s afflicting the entire world plays out in miniature in one such institution’s three wards. Only one woman, the wife of an ophthalmologist (played in the film by Julianne Moore), remains unaffected, and she slowly learns that the ability to see isn’t just a convenience — it’s an incredible responsibility.
“I went far away from the book at times, but then I read my script and realized it wasn’t the story I wanted to tell,” says McKellar. “So I found myself returning to the book. Now it’s pretty faithful to it. I wanted to maintain that feeling of the broken civilization, and also the suddenness of the collapse was really important. I wanted that feeling — like that the stock market could collapse at any moment, that all of this could happen very quickly. That was the most timely thing for me. And the central relationship, the doctor and his wife, that was something I wanted to preserve and also elaborate on. The more I talked to blind people and saw mixed blind-sighted couples, the more accurate I thought it was. There’s something very intimate about that journey, and that relationship of mutual care — that ultimate dependent relationship.”
Even though Saramego insisted that he be kept out of the writing process, he did impose a number of eccentric stipulations on the project. First, the ambiguous setting of the novel had to be maintained. The other requests were a bit more odd. McKellar was only too happy to oblige.
“At the beginning, he said that he didn’t want anything to do with the writing, but we wanted to keep him involved because... well, because he’s a Nobel Prize-winning author, and it was important that he like the movie,” says McKellar. “I sent him every draft I had. He had certain issues; he had that image of the dog — I don’t know why that was important to him. When we were talking about the man with the dark eye patch, the man played by Danny Glover in the film, he wanted that guy to be tall. I think part of it was because he saw himself in the part — the older, slightly detached observer. So it’s probably the same with the dog — he probably had some very personal dog in mind. He didn’t want a little yappy dog. He wanted a strong, leading-man dog.”
Not every story surrounding Blindness has an offbeat happy ending, though. Since premièring at Cannes, the film has been almost universally panned (the film is sitting at 38 per cent on review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes), and while some of the criticism is ridiculous hyperbole — as it always is — Blindness is definitely a film with some major problems. Still, they aren’t so serious that they should deter anyone intrigued by the premise, and I would even go so far as to recommend it — albeit with half a dozen or so caveats. While McKellar says he was surprised by the vigour with which some critics have been denunciating it, he wasn’t entirely surprised by the reaction.
“I was certainly surprised by the negative reviews, because the critics we gave it to in advance were really positive, and at the screening at Cannes we got this long standing ovation,” says McKellar. “I think that some people had it in for [director] Fernando [Meirelles] because they thought that he was too popular. We kind of knew that, and that there would be a bit of a backlash, but we were still shocked by it. On the other hand, the film wasn’t totally finished at Cannes. There were still some issues that we wanted to change. Even when we were taking our bows we were thinking of little changes. In that sense, we kind of set ourselves up. It’s dangerous rushing to finish for a film festival. But we screened a more final version here in Toronto, and we were very pleased with the results.”
Blindness is a film worth seeing for its failures as much as its successes. The struggles the filmmakers had in adapting the novel are obvious throughout, but there are a handful of truly classic cinematic moments, although they’re somewhat quieter and simpler than a “rosebud” or an “I am your father.” That, and if you don’t go see it, McKellar might just break into your house with a laser watch, knock you out with a judo chop and steal your girlfriend. The last part of that sentence is flat-out baseless and unverifiable.
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