All the Light We Cannot See
★ ★ 1/2
Netflix, from November 2
You’re never going to please everyone with an adaptation of a much loved book, but Netflix’s new series based on Anthony Doerr’s 2014 All The Light We Cannot See might have trouble pleasing anyone who read the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel.
Doerr’s sprawling book, which has sold more than 15 million copies, features two young protagonists living very different lives during World War II. After much nuanced and intricate storytelling, their lives eventually converge. It’s a story about family, connection, fate, morality and duty.
Aria Mia Loberti, in her first acting role, is the highlight of this adaptation.Credit: Katalin Vermes/Netflix
But in the hands of director/producer Shawn Levy, whose credits include the film Free Guy and episodes of Stranger Things, this four-part series becomes an oversimplified, schmaltzy wartime story with a wildly different ending.
Mercifully, there’s some big-budget production design and solid performances to ease the pain, particularly that of first-time actor Aria Mia Loberti, who plays Marie-Laure LeBlanc. As in the book, time jumps around, and we’re first introduced to Marie in 1944, as American warplanes bombard occupied Saint Malo, a coastal city in the north-west of France.
She’s at a radio, transmitting messages, as well as reading from Jules Verne’s Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea – the first messages are for her missing father, Daniel (a very one-dimensional Mark Ruffalo), and her great uncle Etienne (Hugh Laurie; even he can’t save this), whose house she is transmitting from. Marie and Daniel fled Paris when the Germans invaded, and have been working for the French Resistance; the Jules Verne passages are encoded messages for the Americans.
What makes Marie’s work with the Resistance remarkable is that she has been blind since childhood – and Loberti is also vision impaired, having auditioned for the role after a global callout for VI actors. For a debut actor, Loberti is remarkable, the best thing about the series.
Marie sends these messages from her great uncle’s transmitter, from which for many years he has broadcast stories and scientific facts, calling himself The Professor; Marie has long been a fan of his broadcasts. Another long-time listener is a young German man named Werner (Louis Hofmann), who would secretly listen while growing up in an orphanage (radio being banned by the Third Reich).
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A gifted radio engineer, Werner was recruited from the orphanage to work for the Nazis and in the present day is also in Saint Malo, his skills being used to root out illegal broadcasts. He stumbles on to The Professor’s old frequency, and discovers Marie’s messages, but is loath to tell his superiors.
Any moral conflict Doerr’s original character wrestled with is completely absent here, and Werner is portrayed merely as a nice Nazi while his superior, Reinhold von Rumpel (a wild-eyed Lars Eidinger), who collects jewels for the Reich, is definitely not nice. He’s looking for something Marie has – a diamond that her father Daniel saved from the Museum of Natural History where he worked before the war. Much fabled, the stone is said to be cursed.
In Doerr’s book, the diamond is more metaphor than the springboard for epic action sequences it’s become on screen. It’s just one of many examples of the loss of the source material’s subtleties in translation to the screen – the constant explanation of the title is perhaps the worst – which feels both overblown and hurried. And, worse, a missed opportunity.
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