Hal Kitchen
No doubt pleased by the domestic success of his The Three Musketeers duology released last year, producer Dimitri Rassam follows up with another lush Alexandre Dumas adaptation, this time of perhaps the most famous, influential, celebrated and convoluted of all revenge stories, The Count of Monte Cristo.
I must admit I have only a passing familiarity with the novel, so assessing the merits or otherwise of this film as an adaptation I will have to leave in other hands. However, all adaptations ought ideally to speak for themselves, and as a decades-spanning revenge drama, there’s some things that The Count of Monte Cristo gets right, and some it gets wrong. Or, so as not to speak in terms of right and wrong, there were times it gripped me and times it did not.
For those even less initiated than I was, The Count of Monte Cristo is the story of Edmond Dantes (Pierre Niney), a sailor whose life is upended when his simple charity and courage in saving a woman from drowning lands him in prison. You see the woman he saved, Angele (Adele Simphal) was secretly an agent of the exiled Napoleon, and the sister of the local prosecutor (Laurent Lafitte), who, with the help of a disgraced local captain with a grudge (Patrick Mille) Edmond’s love rival (Bastien Bouillon) frames Edmond to avoid having his family exposed. Edmond is separated from his fiance (Anais Desmoustier) and flung in gaol, where he, with the help of a former Abbé and his treasure, concocts the single most needlessly convoluted revenge plot in history. Why Edmond can’t simply set himself up as a barber and make his nemeses into pies, or challenge them to single combat in the Colosseum like other great seekers of vengeance and instead needs to coerce two teenagers into seduce their offspring I don’t know, it’s certainly not because the latter is more entertaining to watch, I can tell you!
I understand that The Count of Monte Cristo is not an easy book to adapt, and there’s a lot they already cut, but I should have liked to have seen them get even freer with the axe and condense the plot a little more. The trouble is not that the final film is a full three hours long, but that at the end of those three hours, I’m not much more invested than I would’ve been by the end of most two hour movies. That extra time could have been better used fleshing out a few of these elements, rather than trying to cram in so many. Even in a film of this size, so many subplots and supporting characters are left to jostle for position and your investment in any one of them inevitably suffers, so much that you may find yourself summoning a Monty Python-style chorus of “GET ON WITH IT!”.
Take the character of Haydée (Anamaria Vartolomei), who comes out of nowhere. A more succinct and cunning adaptation would have just handed her function of seducing Albert to the already established character of Angele, who disappears unceremoniously from the narrative just as Haydée inexplicably turns up and already has an established motive for participating in the Count’s scheme. Instead we’re introduced (that is to say, she shows up, she doesn’t actually get any kind of introduction) to this new character whose motives and investment are left as a mystery for the next hour. It’s not as if there’s a concern about her being recognized or looking too old since we have Mission: Impossible masks, which are hilarious by the way. It would have given us a character for the Count to have a genuine back and forth with, a legitimate partner in crime who could develop into a foil for his lust for vengeance. As it is, the title character actually starts to fade into the background at the halfway point, and we’re left with a cohort of drippy teens pining for one another with our real protagonist playing puppet-master and not noticeably taking any revenge at all!
When the film does actually focus on Edmond Dantes, his determination to see his own warped vision of justice realized, and his Machiavellian plan put into motion, it’s pretty solidly entertaining. The first hour detailing his imprisonment and escape is really gripping, but other stories have told us far more about their characters and the folly of wrath at the expense of far less hot air. Niney is okay in the central role, though I think the film might have benefited from a more intense antihero. It might have helped us keep focused on the stakes, his plan is so Byzantine it’s easy to lose sight of what his actual goal is. He does have some great scenes though, especially with Desmoustier. I’d say the two big confrontation scenes they have are probably the strongest parts of the whole movie, getting closer to the real meat of the characters than any others. I argued against maintaining her character but Vartolomei also gets some standout moments of emotion, it’s nothing ground breaking but it is the kind of currency this film is disappointingly short on. As the hot-tempered Andre, Vassili Schneider also brings an intensity the film would’ve benefited from more of.
For a good deal of its runtime The Count of Monte Cristo is being carried by a) the inherent strength of its classic story, even if this isn’t the best version of it, you’ll be reminded of enough things you love that you’ll convince yourself you’re having a good time; there’s a bit of Sweeney Todd here, some Barry Lyndon there, all that good stuff. And b) the production values which are admittedly very high. The lighting and sets are honestly carrying some scenes, and I often felt I was watching something that could’ve been incredible if only the scene had been staged and blocked more creatively. The sets were so lavish and the material so compelling and yet the alchemy just wasn’t there to bring the chills. The compositions were too bland, the performances too stoic, the characters too bare bones.
I wish I could be more enthusiastic about The Count of Monte Cristo, it has received some rave reviews and seems to have mostly been well received by fans of the book, but perhaps their prior investment in and knowledge of the story helps them fill in the gaps on the film’s behalf. Taken on its own merits, The Count of Monte Cristo is a commendably ambitious undertaking that’s generally watchable but ultimately not quite as entertaining as it feels like it ought to be.
