All the Light We Cannot See
Does everyone else remember in 2014 when Anthony Doerr's All the Light We Cannot See was released and it was like everywhere? It won the Pulitzer, it won the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence, it was the choice for book clubs everywhere, even my Mom's! It was THE BOOK of the moment. And, because of the society we live in which doesn't see a book as an end product, everyone was talking about the adaptation to come as a future darling of the Oscars. The buzz was literally up there with Killers of the Flower Moon and The Devil in the White City, and I just realized that those were both optioned by Martin Scorsese. And then we finally got an adaptation of All the Light We Cannot See, with multiple Oscars nominees no less, and like nobody talked about it. At all. James Newton Howard did the freakin' music and we're just not going to talk about it!?! I just don't understand this. It somehow fell through the cracks between Killers of the Flower Moon and The Devil in the White City, it didn't go to the Oscars and it didn't get bogged down in developmental hell. It came and it was forgotten and I am here to say, it's not that bad. Personally, I really don't like reading or watching anything to do with WWII, or Mark Ruffalo for that matter, but I'm a sucker for Hugh Laurie. In other words, I am in no way the target audience for this and yet I found it enjoyable. You could see what it wanted to be and how it fell just short. Like not everyone was the first choice. Which can really be seen with the character of Standartenführer Reinhold von Rumpel played by Lars Eidinger. This role was written for Rory Kinnear. How do I know this? Just watch the show, it's glaringly obvious. In fact I have a whole scenario written in my head where they approached Rory and he was like, naw, already did that. And then they'd be all, when the hell did you do this? To which he'd say, Penny Dreadful: City of Angels... And then it would get very awkward because that show was so so bad and I don't even really want to admit I watched it myself and these imaginary suits obviously had never even heard of it. So, that's when they hired Lars Eidinger and said, can you give us your best Rory Kinnear? I mean, even his weirdly long forelock was so like Rory's in the original Penny Dreadful I just can't not see this... But I have to say that one thing that really impressed me about this production, aside from the Mark Ruffalo stunt casting, is that the Germans were played by Germans, Marie-Laure LeBlanc, a blind girl, is shockingly played by an actress with low vision. Representation matters and Aria Mia Loberti made the character and the show feel authentic. You weren't thinking, wow, I really believe this character is blind, good for this totally sighted actress for pulling it off. You we thinking Aria Mia Loberti IS Marie-Laure. As others have said, this was her first ever acting job, and she brings something special, something genuine to the role. As more productions think about inclusion I'm sure she will get plenty of roles. I mean, she's already popped up on The Spiderwick Chronicles.
Dorothy Parker is easily the most quoted American author known for her caustic wit and sharp tongue. An American Oscar Wilde, if you will. She had the brains and the bite. Dorothy Rothschild, not those Rothschilds, was born in New Jersey but quickly whisked back to New York, so as she could be a true New Yorker. Once her mother died her relationship with her father was contentious until his death when she was twenty. A year later she sold her first poem to Vanity Fair, a magazine she would eventually work at after a two year stint at Vogue. In fact she'd bounce around the various New York publications, from The New Yorker to Esquire and all those in between, for many years, though it was her work as the theatre critic for Vanity Fair, where she was filling in for P.G. Wodehouse when he was on vacation, that made her career take off. This time in her life was centered around her lunches at the Algonquin Round Table. She held her own as one of the few women at a table of (almost) equally smart and wisecracking male colleagues.
