I was so looking forward to this series after viewing the trailers earlier this year. I have loved this book deeply and yearned to see it brought to life for the screen, but I was terribly disappointed. They took out some of the most beautiful parts of the book such as the intricate puzzles Mark Ruffalo's character made for his blind daughter out of wood, a secret love language between them. Yes, they show the intricate models of Paris and St Malo he made to teach her how to find her way around, but they leave out his special skill of creating brilliant puzzles for hiding objects, and how quickly Marie-Laure solves them. How the Sea of Flames, the fabled and cursed diamond, was hidden in such a puzzle of their house in St Malo, how she figured that out, and how she carried it with her.
They left out the relationships Werner had with two of the men in his training institute, as if he only had a special love with his sister, the nun who ran the orphanage, and "the professor" whose talks he listened to while falling asleep - which is wonderful! And then how he and Marie-Laure are connected serendipitously via their love of and discovery of "the professor." Ridiculous oversimplification with all the evil being done to Marie-Laure and her family by one man, rather than the much more poignant diffusion of fate to the four winds during war. I really hated the tidy tying up of loose ends with a possibility of the two young people getting together after the war - not the book at all! Not real life at all.
The book and its elements lent all the beauty and poignancy, but the film only allowed for some. The actors were way too melodramatic. The blind girl made far too much eye contact. Mark Ruffalo was not a good choice - what, an American with a British accent as a Frenchman?
They left out the relationships Werner had with two of the men in his training institute, as if he only had a special love with his sister, the nun who ran the orphanage, and "the professor" whose talks he listened to while falling asleep - which is wonderful! And then how he and Marie-Laure are connected serendipitously via their love of and discovery of "the professor." Ridiculous oversimplification with all the evil being done to Marie-Laure and her family by one man, rather than the much more poignant diffusion of fate to the four winds during war. I really hated the tidy tying up of loose ends with a possibility of the two young people getting together after the war - not the book at all! Not real life at all.
The book and its elements lent all the beauty and poignancy, but the film only allowed for some. The actors were way too melodramatic. The blind girl made far too much eye contact. Mark Ruffalo was not a good choice - what, an American with a British accent as a Frenchman?
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