Netflix’s All The Light We Cannot See review: Trite adaptation of Pulitzer-winning classic is criminally simplistic

Mark Ruffalo and Hugh Laurie in All the Light We Cannot See on Netflix. The miniseries has none of the brevity and observational astuteness of Anthony Doerr's Pulitzer-winning novel. (Screen grab/YouTube/Netflix)

“In war, being unseen can keep you alive,” quips Daniel, the cheerful French father of a blind girl who wants to instead, face the truths of the world. It’s just one of the many scenes that’ll make you wonder where the brevity, the observational astuteness of the novel has disappeared, in a series that feels like an affront to a literary specimen. Much like the fatuous sequence, Netflix’s much-awaited adaptation of Anthony Doerr’s Pulitzer-prize winning All the Light We Cannot See flaps in muddy waters with the ruthless glee of a chirrupy kid taking a lawnmower to a lone strand of grass. None of the subtleties of the novel, the multi-layer development of characters, the complicated arcs of conflict told through its many characters translate in an adaptation that makes that clichéd conclusion inevitable: the book’s better!

Aria Mia Loberti plays Marie, a blind girl sending out an illicit, secret broadcast over censored radio, as allied armies rain bombs on the German-occupied town of Saint-Malo (France). Listening to her transmission on the other side of the ideological divide is Werner (Louis Hofmann), a reluctant good-hearted Nazi that the show champions as a sort of cushion for everything the Nazis stand for. Everyone but Werner is evil, spitting blood with concussed wide-eyed ego or mania. Perverted monsters or in the one case a hedonistic megalomaniac on the hunt for a jewel that might guarantee immortality. Literary subtlety is literally tossed in favour of broad, homogenizing strokes of contempt.

Marie and Werner are connected by the lean thread of a radio programme they both listened to on the radio as children. As the allied forces move in to end German occupation, the last remaining officers scour bodies to lynch or vacuums to fill with regret and dejection.

The backdrop to this case of crossed wires, is formed by Marie’s father, played by a somewhat clueless Mark Ruffalo, and her uncle Etienne, the miscast Hugh Laurie, a traumatized veteran of the first world war.

Flashbacks establish Marie’s tender relationship with her father, Etienne’s with his paranoia, Werner’s with his orphaned existence, but they barely register in a plot that flattens the source material to a sorting exercise between good and bad. Some of the dialogue will make you cringe in agony, including a metaphor about lions and spilt milk which makes you wonder if the writing room even paid heed to the humbling specificities of a conflict that has shaped much of the modern world.

To say that most actors here are miscast, underused or wasted is an understatement, considering Oscar-winning All Quiet On The Western Front’s (also a Netflix production) Felix Kammerer has a weak little cameo that ends with his head split open and his reputation smeared across the wall of a poor follow-up to that stellar lead performance. Two blind girls have been cast to play childhood and adolescent Marie, but the rest of the cast feels out of place. Marie happens to be the destination for more than one genocidal surge of emotion here but the sight of her protective uncle, riding in on a motorcycle with a machine gun in hand, practically coughs shallowness and insincerity.

Created by Steven Knight and Shawn Levy, this four-part series at least has cinematography, and the look and feel of a romantic sojourn to gloat about. It looks beautiful, even if hollowed by a sense of listlessness. You’d think radio and tech intrigue measuring up to a coastal town under siege would offer an intriguing aural canvas. Instead, All The Light We Cannot See makes you see things in such blunt, inarticulate proportions, having fudged details, concocted detours and culled important characters that you are willing to entertain the possibility that to be able to accept this series, you maybe need to erase the book from memory. Even then, it’s a delirious mess of poor choices, corny supporting characters, some terrible accents and foremost, the reluctance to at least add up to history in ways that go beyond cobbled streets and CGI bombings.

It’s probably an accomplishment of sorts to waste Ruffalo and Laurie together, to make them look like rookies in front of the sincere Hoffman and Loberti. There is simply no soul to this banal quest to juggle a few war tropes for the sake of a good versus evil story. You’d grant the challenges of adapting a book that changes mood, positioning and character within pages, but it’s precisely the grooved rhythm that the cinematic medium offers. Unless, creators mercilessly squeeze complexity out of a story and turn it into a bland, unexceptional strut through politics-affirming checkpoints in history; redemption like it were a ticketed commodity. Redemption that in this adaptation, as an artistic pursuit at least, you cannot see.

All the Light We Cannot See is now streaming on Netflix.