His growing happiness with Vikander’s outgoing expression of life-loving is touchingly done. His war experiences have left him withdrawn, and Fassbender captures his troubled containment with a persuasive minimalism. Cianfrance is perhaps more concerned to establish the basis for Tom’s moral conflict from the outset. Sometimes that ‘how’ of the film can lead you to wonder why. She is Isabel (Alicia Vikander) he takes up the Janus appointment they subsequently marry and are very happy together but there are two poignantly recorded miscarriages on the island before the crucial arrival of the drifting boat. Accepting what is to be a temporary job as keeper of the Janus lighthouse, in the film’s first few minutes on another beach, he sees a happy girl feeding gulls. When his train arrives, many injured servicemen disembark. Stedman opens her novel on Janus Rock island, with a boat containing a dead man and a baby washed up and pulled into shore by lighthouse-keeper Tom Sherbourne, whose young wife, Isabel, urges him to delay reporting this to the authorities, and embraces the child.Ĭianfrance’s film opens eight years earlier with Tom (Michael Fassbender), a veteran of the Great War, ‘looking to get away from things for a while’. Stedman’s engrossing 2012 bestseller ( reviewed by ABR in April 2012), has opted to retain to a remarkable extent the novel’s narrative trajectory – with one major exception. Where then does The Light Between Oceans stand in this matter? Director–screenwriter Derek Cianfrance, in adapting M.L. As one who believes fidelity to be great for relationships, I favour playing around for adaptations.

Attention is then apt to focus on how the filmmaker has responded to the original, and the ‘what’ can then often be seriously challenged. If you’ve just read a novel prior to seeing the film derived from it, you tend to know what to expect in the way of major plot manoeuvres.

The light between oceans author