It should have been a marriage made in heaven; it is more like a miscarriage in hell. You would have put a million euros on Brazil's Fernando Meirelles, of City of God , as the right artist to film novelist José Saramago's masterly horror fable Blindness . The two men speak the same language - or languages (Portuguese and the argot of apocalypse) - and share an ability to confer on a teeming cast of characters individuality of vision, purpose and intelligence.
Calamity. Back to the bookmakers. The "maker of books" involved here, a Nobel laureate who dreamed up a city cursed with blindness, where only one seeing person (the wife of an ophthalmologist) shares the reader's access to the nightmare images of a disintegrating society, must wonder how his powerful vision became a movie so cumbrous, so cliché-packed, so resembling an Armageddon epic from Lala-land, USA.
