You may think that four hour-long episodes (essentially one long, bingeable movie) would provide Steven Knight and Shawn Levy’s All the Light We Cannot See with plenty of time to explore the diverse ways that two young people living during World War II—a blind girl aiding the French Resistance and a Nazi Wehrmacht-member-turn-defector listening to her on shortwave radio—experience their world turning upside down. Instead, the Netflix limited series based on Anthony Doerr’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel sacrifices valuable narrative depth, character development, and historical nuances in favor of empty platitudes, moral absolutism, and drone shots of the French seaside. Marie-Laure LeBlanc becomes a sightless, superpowered Mary Sue; Werner Pfennig, a starry-eyed victim of circumstance, is basically forced to heil Hitler at gunpoint.
As often happens when fictionalizing the past, this war becomes far too simple: it’s a battle of good versus evil, reason versus superstition, darkness versus light (even if it’s light we cannot see). The Americans become unquestioningly virtuous liberators, the Nazis malicious caricatures yelling things like “What you are is your race!” and “The lion is not free to be a lamb!”
Some of Netflix’s casting choices are spot on. Lars Eidinger’s fanatical Sergeant Major Reinhold von Rumpel and Louis Hofmann’s unquestionably Aryan Werner come to mind, as does Marie, who is portrayed by blind newcomers Aria Mia Loberti and Nell Sutton (an inclusive casting choice we might get more of, if we’re lucky). Others, however, remain bizarre and unexplainable beyond big-box name recognition: Hugh Laurie’s shell-shocked Uncle Etienne seems to suffer more from boredom than PTSD, and Mark Ruffalo plays Marie’s sage and whimsical father, Daniel, while sporting a laughably unconvincing British accent.
There are a few moments that sparkle like a diamond beneath the rubble of this series. The scenes that feature a young Marie allow Sutton to shine, and some visually and emotionally arresting moments can be found in Werner’s backstory. The bulk of these include his time at the National Political Institute of Education, scenes that, while often moving, are riddled with enough overt Nazi rhetoric to rival the satirism of Jojo Rabbit (2019).
“Sentimentality is a potent and cheap smokescreen. It shelters us from the barrage of deeper emotions, and spares us from their ethical implications. It substitutes surfaces for depths, and glamor for complexity,” wrote the New Republic‘s Dominic Green of All the Light We Cannot See, shortly following the book’s 2014 publication. Unfortunately, this Netflix original miniseries suffers from the same sickly sweet sentimental shortcomings as the novel, if not more so. It’s visually stunning, star-studded, and expensively produced, but this reviewer struggles to find an enthusiastic audience for it beyond the odd middle school history class. Four hour-long episodes.
