The Count of Monte Cristo (2024)
Jun. 14th, 2025 11:21 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
pedantherTo echo a review I gave recently to another three-hour movie, I mostly don't regret spending the time watching the Delaporte-de La Patellière film version of The Count of Monte Cristo, but it's mainly because if I hadn't I'd have always wondered what I'd missed.
The movie is like the mansion that this version of the Count inhabits: large and elaborately decorated, but hollow and echoing and surprisingly empty of real people. Despite the running time, and the jettisoning of large portions of the novel, parts of the plot feel rushed and missing out on connective tissue that would give it emotional heft. The villains are caricaturishly evil, divorced from the historical context that created them - indeed, the film has so little regard for historical context that Edmond is arrested as a suspected agent of Bonaparte in May 1815, the height of Bonaparte's return to power - and the fates the Count arranges for them are for the most part over surprisingly quickly and lack all the poetry or sense of inevitability of the fates they get in the novel. Supporting characters don't get properly introduced. Large chunks of the movie have been made up by the screenwriters, and when bits of the novel do appear they've often been given to different characters, or otherwise deprived of the context that gave them meaning. (The movie retains the conversation from Mercedes' dinner party where she keeps trying to get the Count to eat something, anything, to disprove her suspicion that he's avoiding the bond of taking an enemy's hospitality - but sets it at a party that's not hosted by Mercedes. I ask you.)
There's a romantic subplot - another invention of the screenwriters - which I've seen other people complain about, but I found that I didn't mind it; it was one of the few parts of the movie that felt to me like it had all the emotional beats filled in. And I wasn't bothered by it being so different from the book, it turned out, because by the time it got going I'd long since given up on expecting anything in the movie to be like the book. Acting out of character loses its meaning when they're a completely different character who happens to have the same name.
If I had a nickel for every French screen adaptation of The Count of Monte Cristo I've seen that added a scene where the Count goes into a church to tell God off for letting injustice go unpunished and declare that he's going to do the job God wouldn't, I'd have two nickels, which doesn't sound like a lot but that's every French screen adaptation of The Count of Monte Cristo I've seen. And it's entirely contrary to the Count's attitude in the novel, where he's convinced that he's acting as an agent of God's will.
There's some weirdly ambivalent stuff going on with the female characters. Eugenie is explicitly a lesbian in this version, but she has much less agency and doesn't get the happy ending with her lady friend that she got in the novel. Haydee doesn't get her big moment from the novel; Mercedes gets one of her big moments, somewhat undercut by the writers showing their hand too early, but not the other. (And, in a small detail that really annoyed me, is shown hesitating and casting a backward glance at a moment when the novel is very clear that she left without looking back.) Several male characters from the novel have their plot functions combined into a single new female character who's spunky and dresses like a kickass and gets taken down like a punk the moment that her moxie threatens to derail the plot; what she suffers during Edmond's years as a prisoner are at least as worthy of an elaborate revenge as what he suffers, but while he gets a fortune and vengeance, she gets to deliver some exposition and then promptly die so the writers don't have to figure out what to do with her. If this movie sticks with me, it's going to be because I'm imagining the version of the story where she survives and gets to be actually as kickass as she's initially presented. It would be more fun, and it's tempting to suggest that it wouldn't be any less The Count of Monte Cristo than the movie we actually got.
The movie is like the mansion that this version of the Count inhabits: large and elaborately decorated, but hollow and echoing and surprisingly empty of real people. Despite the running time, and the jettisoning of large portions of the novel, parts of the plot feel rushed and missing out on connective tissue that would give it emotional heft. The villains are caricaturishly evil, divorced from the historical context that created them - indeed, the film has so little regard for historical context that Edmond is arrested as a suspected agent of Bonaparte in May 1815, the height of Bonaparte's return to power - and the fates the Count arranges for them are for the most part over surprisingly quickly and lack all the poetry or sense of inevitability of the fates they get in the novel. Supporting characters don't get properly introduced. Large chunks of the movie have been made up by the screenwriters, and when bits of the novel do appear they've often been given to different characters, or otherwise deprived of the context that gave them meaning. (The movie retains the conversation from Mercedes' dinner party where she keeps trying to get the Count to eat something, anything, to disprove her suspicion that he's avoiding the bond of taking an enemy's hospitality - but sets it at a party that's not hosted by Mercedes. I ask you.)
There's a romantic subplot - another invention of the screenwriters - which I've seen other people complain about, but I found that I didn't mind it; it was one of the few parts of the movie that felt to me like it had all the emotional beats filled in. And I wasn't bothered by it being so different from the book, it turned out, because by the time it got going I'd long since given up on expecting anything in the movie to be like the book. Acting out of character loses its meaning when they're a completely different character who happens to have the same name.
If I had a nickel for every French screen adaptation of The Count of Monte Cristo I've seen that added a scene where the Count goes into a church to tell God off for letting injustice go unpunished and declare that he's going to do the job God wouldn't, I'd have two nickels, which doesn't sound like a lot but that's every French screen adaptation of The Count of Monte Cristo I've seen. And it's entirely contrary to the Count's attitude in the novel, where he's convinced that he's acting as an agent of God's will.
There's some weirdly ambivalent stuff going on with the female characters. Eugenie is explicitly a lesbian in this version, but she has much less agency and doesn't get the happy ending with her lady friend that she got in the novel. Haydee doesn't get her big moment from the novel; Mercedes gets one of her big moments, somewhat undercut by the writers showing their hand too early, but not the other. (And, in a small detail that really annoyed me, is shown hesitating and casting a backward glance at a moment when the novel is very clear that she left without looking back.) Several male characters from the novel have their plot functions combined into a single new female character who's spunky and dresses like a kickass and gets taken down like a punk the moment that her moxie threatens to derail the plot; what she suffers during Edmond's years as a prisoner are at least as worthy of an elaborate revenge as what he suffers, but while he gets a fortune and vengeance, she gets to deliver some exposition and then promptly die so the writers don't have to figure out what to do with her. If this movie sticks with me, it's going to be because I'm imagining the version of the story where she survives and gets to be actually as kickass as she's initially presented. It would be more fun, and it's tempting to suggest that it wouldn't be any less The Count of Monte Cristo than the movie we actually got.
