Fortune Favours the Bold: The Count of Monte Cristo (2024)

Delaporte and Patelliere dive headfirst into every bottomless trench of the dramatic potential the story holds and emerge with their arms full of treasure to share with you.

Grade: A

Fortune favours the bold. The Ancient Romans said so and sometimes it does, even in filmmaking: Oppenheimer, Maestro, Anora. Other times it doesn’t (Babylon) and sometimes fortune goes haywire and drops a box office bursting with greenbacks on the most undeserving of films (The Lion King remake). Fortune has favoured The Count of Monte Cristo, the latest adaption of Alexandre Dumas’ classic 19^th century novel, written and directed by Matthieu Delaporteand Alexandre de La Patelliere (who wrote the screenplays for Martin Bourboulon’s recent and riveting adaptions of Dumas’ other classic novel The Three Musketeers). The film cost around $49 million to make but has already made over $77 million.

You must be bold to adapt The Count of Monte Cristo. Any artist attempting to turn Dumas’ novel into a film must grapple with its extreme complexity. The primary plot of the story is simple enough. Edmond Dantes is a young Marseilles sailor. He’s just been promoted to captain in a merchant’s fleet and is about to marry the woman he loves. Four jealous and selfish men plot against Dantes and Dantes is falsely arrested on his wedding day, thrown into prison and remains there for ten years. Dantes escapes and recovers a fortune in hidden treasure from the island of Monte Cristo. With this fortune and the knowledge he’s gained in prison, Dantes forges a new identity: the Count of Monte Cristo. He returns to France under this mask to take revenge on those who destroyed his life. Once you move away from that plotline with the story’s central cast of Dantes, his beloved and his despoilers, to those characters orbiting around them, then it gets complicated. Dumas spins secondary character after secondary character off from the primary characters, wives, daughters and sons, and entangles them all in Dantes’ complex and meticulously spun revenge plot. To read The Count of Monte Cristo, you will need a chart to keep track of who is what to whom and if and how anyone knows or is related to or wants revenge on anyone else.

Yet The Count of Monte Cristo is worth it. Dantes endures one of the most monstrous injustices to grace the pages of literature yet arises out of the tragedy reborn. Like Batman (a comparison I’ve made elsewhere), Iron Man and other characters of popular literature, he is broken but reassembles himself into a new, more powerful form through sheer force of will. His story is nothing less than that of an innocent man destroyed and reborn as an avenging angel (or possibly demon).

Delaporte and Patelliere go a bit too quick in trying to cover the full breadth of Dantes’ story. They make liberal use of flash-forwards. Titles reading so and so many years later appear at least four times and some are necessary. After he escapes his prison, Dantes (Pierre Niney) recruits and trains his two wards Andrea (Julien de Saint Jean) and Haydee (Anamaria Vartolomei). Both these young people have suffered at the hands of the same people who destroyed Dantes’ life and they share his thirst for vengeance and they plot with him to destroy the men who wronged them all. All the years Dantes spends doing that are rightly consigned to that unseen space covered up by a flash forward. However, Delaporte and Patelliere also submerge into that space Dantes’ years in prison. Dantes is arrested one moment and the next moment, he’s been in prison for four years. There are no prolonged fades and dissolves between scenes that show, with the passage of one year after another, Dantes’ cruel prison overseer gradually forget Dantes’ name and Dantes cease in defeated resignation to pray to God, as Kevin Reynolds did in the 2002 adaption. Delaporte and Patelliere skimp on reaching into the immense well of time Dantes spends rotting in this hellish pit and that’s integral to the foundation of his revenge story.

Yet Delaporte and Patelliere’s skimping stops there. They dive headfirst into every bottomless trench of the dramatic potential the story holds and emerge with their arms full of treasure to share with you. Their film is a gold-platted rollercoaster filled with the sudden, immense and thrilling twists and turns and sudden drops and rises befitting a great 19th century novel like The Count of Monte Cristo, some of which are in the original novel, others derived from the novel’s events and others which are Delaporte and Patelliere’s own inventions. One of Dantes’ targets gives the Count everything he owns as security for a loan from the Count thinking the Count is his friend but does not know Dantes will use it to destroy him. The woman Dantes loved begs him not to kill her son. Haydee confesses her love for a man she thinks dead while he sits and listens concealed inside a carriage. If you do not want to leap from you chair and cheer or sink back into its cushions weeping at any stage of this film, you have no heart.

Delaporte and Patelliere’s greatest dramatic innovation upon Dumas’ original text is how they construct a moral suspense within the story. Dumas didn’t seem to have any problems with revenge. “Revenge is a poison man that rots a man from within,” Batman once said, yet Dumas’ novel passes without Dantes ever wondering or anyone suggesting to him that his 20^th century parallel may be right. That’s the greatest change Delaporte and Patelliere make to Dantes’ story and they do so in a sophisticated manner. Less competent and ingenious artists would do something sanctimoniously indelicate like a sermon from some otherwise redundant secondary character howling into the wind about how revenge is wrong without explaining why. They keep all four of Dantes’ targets from the original text (others would be tempted to combine them into one person for simplicity) and this means Dantes, with Andrea and Haydee’s aid, must construct a highly elaborate plot to destroy these men. As he and his children plot, rehearsing down to the minutest detail what they will say, how they will walk and when they will meet another’s eyes, to entrap their victims, Delaporte and Patelliere pan quickly around them and even cut back and forth between the trio rehearsing and when they actually perform their carefully constructed charade.

The sense of conspiracy is almost Hitchcockian, yet you are not just wondering if the intricate plot will succeed but also if you want it to. The Count instructs Haydee to “cast a spell” on Albert (Vassili Schneider) who is the only son of one of Dantes’ targets. Haydee’s face is almost always an icy mask, Vartolomei is as coldly beautiful an ice queen as Anya-Taylor Joy, except when she is with Albert. Those are the only times she smiles and its wider and brighter than anyone else’s in the room. It’s as if she is made from stone all the time and he is all that can bring her to life. Albert writes to her telling her his memories of her “tremble” in his heart. He clearly loves her and you get a sense that she is falling in love with him. You wonder if she will give up revenge for love, but also if she should. “It isn’t revenge,” Dantes tells her. “It’s justice.” Yet justice here requires Haydee to be so cold, so ruthless, that she burns Albert’s divine love letters to her to avoid becoming attached to this boy she and the Count are determined to reduce to a weapon for their revenge. Delaporte and Patelliere’s dramatic imagination is as great as Dumas’ himself. They turn the moral ambiguity of Dantes’ quest itself into a source of suspense.

Fortune this time has favoured the bold. Delaporte and Patelliere have launched into battle with one of the most challenging yet rewarding texts ever written and have done well. They’ve emerged with a film that, for the most part, lives up to one of the greatest dramas in literature.