Leading the blind

Above: For a film about a young (blind) white guy falling in love with a young Indian woman, Goldwyn Films’ DVD art consciously avoids racial concerns. Although she’s strikingly beautiful and plays the film’s pivotal character, dark-skinned Anjali Jay was nixed from the packaging. In her place are three white supporting actresses who have a combined screen time of ten minutes. She was also left off of the theatrical poster — click here.

Someone calling himself ‘BigBadDude’ left his caustic reaction to Blind Dating (2006) over at the IMDb. Under the title A Crime Against Humanity he writes, “This movie not only made me question my love of film, it made me question the existence of God. Simply horrendous, excruciating and degrading from the first frame to the last. A…painful, insulting, insipid, noxious, toxic bore.” Dude, I felt the same way about Cats on Broadway.

    I’m sure somewhere there’s a thesis on the gobs of testosterone clogging the internet. BigBadDude’s knuckle-dragging observations remind me of Harlan Ellison’s assertion that, against popular belief, people aren’t “entitled to their opinion” as they’re quick to tell us, but they are entitled to their informed opinion. Yet even Mr. Ellison walks a slippery slope here, for what if their information is derived from biased or faulty sources?

    And what does any of this have to do with Blind Dating? New on DVD, it’s an otherwise innocuous romantic comedy with the spin of having a blind man for a lead character, and is nowhere near the monstrosity described by B.B.Dude. It does, in fact, have a couple of tender moments between Chris Pine and Anjali Jay that had me hoping for a better film, or at least a more balanced one.

    I’m not sure where to assign blame for the flaws, which occasionally run deep: first-time screenwriter Christopher Theo, or director James Keach, who’s the actor-brother of Stacy, husband of co-producer/co-star Jane Seymour, and a part-time television director.

    Surely Keach was aware, in the editing, that the scenes between Pine and the women he meets before Jay are strained and thumpingly bad. Broad and underlined, it’s the kind of burlesque that works well in American Pie or There’s Something About Mary. Here, they detract from the genuine concerns with physical impairment and racial issues. (Jay’s character comes from a traditional Indian family; Pine is blind, white and American.) We can only assume Keach imposed autocratic rule on situations beyond his scope that may have fared better under committee guidance.

    Seemingly oblivious of the script’s proclivity for self-destruction, Pine and Jay infuse their characters with warmth and humility. There’s a solid and decent picture waiting to be made about their love, families, and his therapy and experimental eye surgery. As it stands, Blind Dating may have made B.B.Dude “question the existence of God,” but it made me want to see the two leads working with material and a crew more suited to their talents.