Some great books simply aren’t suited to adaptation, though that’s never stopped Hollywood from trying. Judging the book by its cover, and its massive popularity, the appeal of bringing something like Anthony Doerr’s All The Light We Cannot See to the screen is obvious. The Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, set in France and Germany during World War II, is rich with fascinating characters and picturesque locations. But if you dig deeper into its pages you’ll find a dense, non-linear narrative told in lyrical, almost operatic prose. The features that made the novel an elegant page-turner also make it extraordinarily tricky to adapt.
And yet, here we are. All The Light We Cannot See arrives on November 2 on Netflix as a four-episode miniseries. Adapted for the screen by Steven Knight, whose last project was FX’s gritty retelling of Great Expectations, the series does its best to follow the scattered storylines laid out in Doerr’s novel, but constantly feels like it’s trying to bring the viewer up to speed. It’s like listening to a story told by an addled narrator who keeps interrupting themselves to fill you in on some past information that may or may not be pertinent to the story at hand. That may work fine in a novel, but it makes for a rather disjointed viewing experience. The series makes a few changes to the novel, combining characters, altering some familial relationships, and expanding upon a French resistance subplot that has promise, but doesn’t ultimately go anywhere.
The show begins with an air assault on the walled French port town of St. Malo in 1944, in the days preceding its liberation from the Nazis. We follow bombs dropped from a squadron of American planes as they fall onto the city, landing in the middle of a story already in progress. A teenage girl, Marie-Laure LeBlanc (Aria Mia Loberti), sits in the attic of a house, sending out a message to her missing father and great uncle via a radio transmitter and reading a passage from Jules Verne’s 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea. Though she is blind and completely on her own, we quickly learn she’s actually quite capable and self-sufficient.
Through flashbacks, we get some backstory on the house and its owners—Marie’s great aunt and uncle, siblings Madame Manec (Marion Bailey) and Etienne (Hugh Laurie). Marie’s father, Daniel (Mark Ruffalo), brought her to stay with them after the Nazi invasion of Paris, where he had been working as the master locksmith at the Museum of Natural History. Before leaving the museum, he secretly pocketed a famous and valuable diamond called the Sea of Flames, which is thought to be cursed. It is said that those who touch it will live a long life, but their family members will be doomed to suffer. The theft has made them a target of a particular Nazi, Sergeant Major Reinhold von Rumpel (Lars Eidinger), who believes the gem will cure him of a life-threatening illness. While Marie shelters from the bombardment alone in her home, he terrorizes the citizens of St. Malo searching for her.
At the same time, elsewhere in the city, a young German radio operator has discovered Marie’s broadcast, but hides it from his Nazi superiors. This is Werner Pfennig, played by Louis Hofmann, best known to Netflix viewers as Jonas in the twisty German time-travel series Dark. He’s our second protagonist, and his reasons for keeping the signal a secret are doled out gradually through flashbacks to his youth in an orphanage, where he grew up with his sister Jutta (Luna Wedler), until his genius for fixing radios caught the attention of the Third Reich. He’s recruited to attend a nationalist boarding school and later forced to join the military despite being technically too young to be a soldier. The show takes great pains to remind us that despite the iron cross pinned to his chest, and the occasional “Heil Hitler” tossed out for his own protection, he’s no Nazi sympathizer. It may feel a little disconcerting to be rooting for him at first, but Hofmann’s innate likability helps ease you into it.
From the moment we meet them, Werner and Marie are clearly on a collision course that drives the momentum of the episodes, even if the series seems somewhat disinterested in following what proves to be the most engaging story thread. When their paths finally do cross, it’s electric, thanks to the chemistry and performances of Hofmann and Loberti. Among the mostly stellar cast, Ruffalo is a standout, though not in a good way. He’s proven in other projects that he’s more than a capable actor; he’s just woefully miscast here. His laid-back vibe and cringe-worthy attempt at a British accent are not a great fit for this role. It’s a bizarre choice to force him to do an accent at all, when the characters are supposed to be speaking French anyway. And as if the accent wasn’t already distracting enough, it becomes a plot point in one episode, as we are told that Daniel’s Parisian accent makes him a target of suspicion in the tiny provincial town.
All four episodes were directed by Shawn Levy, who also doesn’t seem like a natural fit for this material, at least judging by his previous work, which includes the Night At The Museum films, Stranger Things, and three back-to-back Ryan Reynolds vehicles: Free Guy, The Adam Project, and the upcoming Deadpool 3. Such is the power of an exclusive Netflix deal, though. Levy smartly lets the locations do most of the work for him. The quaint cobblestone streets, brick buildings, stone seawalls, and French cottage interiors give the series a lived-in feel and a distinct European flavor. Some of the scenes were even filmed in the real St. Malo. There’s a nice montage at the end of the final episode featuring archival pictures of the town, which is so central to the story it’s almost a character in itself. (That may sound like a cliché, but that doesn’t mean it can’t be true.)
When it gives you a chance to catch your breath, All The Light We Cannot See can be wonderfully transporting. If only it would let the audience bask in the atmosphere of any of its settings for a while before thrusting us backward or forward in time, it might stick to the ribs a bit more. Of course, that would require a drastic departure from the source material, but maybe there’s nothing wrong with that. The art of adaptation is all about figuring out what changes can be made to the book without sacrificing the spirit of the story.
All The Light We Cannot See premieres November 2 on Netflix