by Jake Bourgeois, Contributing Writer
There are some books, movies, and other pieces of media that leave you with a visceral experience.
Reading All the Light We Cannot See was one of those for me, as I can still feel the emotions that book stirred in me as I devoured it, though, it’s been long enough where just the rough synopsis and those feelings are all that I could recall. Now the Pulitzer Prize-winning book has been made into a four-episode limited series by Netflix, where it attempts to pack the same punch in a new medium.
The story follows the converging paths of a blind French girl, Marie-Laure (Aria Mia Loberti) and a German radio wunderkind, Werner (Louis Hofmann), in the seaside town of Nazi-occupied Saint-Malo, France. The duo found escape in the same short-wave radio frequency in their younger years and find hope in the frequency as the town is bombarded by its potential liberators — even as the illegal broadcasts carry the death penalty, and Werner himself has been tasked with finding its operator.
While some may know Hofmann from Netflix’s Dark, both he and Loberti were new to me. The latter is making her acting debut, and is legally blind. Not being distracted by where I’d seen either of them before really allowed me to focus on their performances, which carry the series, alongside supporting appearances by more familiar faces. I was impressed with Loberti, and particularly the physicality both she and the actress playing her younger self (Nell Sutton) are able to bring to the role. With the blindness being so integral to both the character and the story, the focus on representation during the casting process, and getting a blind actress in the role, pays off in a big way with how authentic it comes across. Though our leads don’t share much screen time, there is a sort of relationship and chemistry built from afar between them through shared experience that needs to work, and does.
In addition to our two leads, the cast is sprinkled with faces you’ll recognize, and I want to draw attention to our main supporting characters. First, Hugh Laurie as Marie’s great uncle Etienne is welcome as a shut-in struggling with his experiences in the last World War who Marie gets to finally come out of his cage. It’s a subtle but complex performance that I enjoyed. Second is Mark Ruffalo as Marie’s father. Though the love for his daughter comes through in his performance, the accent Ruffalo puts on is too often distracting and makes his performance stand out slightly from the rest for the wrong reasons. It’s a nitpick, but one that did take me out of scenes on occasion. The only other character who at times threatens to take me out of what I was watching is our main antagonist, Sergeant Major Reinhold von Rumpel (Lars Eidinger). In a story with its fair share of baddies, von Rumpel threatens (and probably toward the end more than threatens) to cross the line into slightly over-the-top as he seeks a secret that Ruffalo’s LeBlanc has fought to protect.
Aside from the performances, what helps the miniseries land is the strength of the creative team it attracted. It’s developed by the duo of Steven Knight (Locke, Peaky Blinders), who handled the teleplay, and Shawn Levy (Free Guy, Night at the Museum), who sits in the director’s chair. You also have James Newton Howard composing an original score in between a recurring use of the always welcome “Clair de Lune.” It’s a talented group that can elevate an adaptation that would be easy to just drown in cheese and melodrama.
As much as I loved the original book, it’s easy to see the pitfalls the adaptation could have succumbed to in lesser hands. The story is structured in a nonlinear way — cutting between the past and present regularly — which can be frustrating if not handled with care. Here, the flashbacks serve to flesh out and inform what’s happening in the present. Similarly, melodrama can all too easily slide down the slippery slope into soap opera territory. While there’s a Romeo and Juliet influence here, and it’s a story designed to pull on the heartstrings, it never goes too far. When it comes to the comparison with the book, I don’t remember the details well enough to speak on how they may have tweaked things, though it doesn’t pack the emotional punch I recall from reading the novel. Levy, known mostly in his directing for comedies, handles this heavier tone well, and Howard’s soaring scores help accentuate the key moments as needed.
Though at times it can creep close to going full on over-the-top, as someone who’d previously been sucked in by the award-winning novel, it didn’t take me long to get invested in its adaptation. I’m a sucker for a World War II story, even if it is a piece of historical fiction, so I am squarely in its target demographic. However, for fans of the original novel or just the genre in general, All the Light We Cannot See offers more than enough to avoid being weighed down by the admittedly dark subject matter.
Rating: Liked it
All the Light We Cannot See is currently streaming on Netflix
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