If you see only one three-hour-plus epic from last year that spans oceans and decades… see The Brutalist, it’s glorious. BUT: If you’d prefer one that has swords, and since The Brutalist hasn’t made it around here yet anyway, the new French-language adaptation of The Count of Monte Cristo has everything you could possibly want from a movie—adventure, revenge, romance, grand vistas, swooping cameras, disguises, cunning plans… this is why we love sitting in front of those big screens for hours on end.
You may already know the basic story, either from reading Alexandre Dumas’s novel or from any of the previous adaptations, and this version isn’t really interested in messing up a good thing—the young sailor Edmond Dantès is framed for treason and sent to an island prison. There, he meets another prisoner who digs into Edmond’s cell while trying to escape, the two form a bond, and the other man offers his enormous fortune to Edmond just before the man dies and Edmond makes his own escape. And, of course, Edmond then uses that fortune to become the Count of Monte Cristo and to exact revenge against those who set him up in the first place.
Look, it’s just a great story. And this version does a really smart job of streamlining what it can to pack it all into three hours without making obscenely drastic changes. And it updates some details and storylines to connect with modern audiences in ways that are still plausible for the time period. Well, I’m not sure about the Mission Impossible-style masks, but what do I know about 19th-century mask technology?
For whatever reason, the French have lately been making huge, expensive versions of their literary classics, with this movie following on the heels of the also-rousing four-hour version of The Three Musketeers, and so far, the results have been fantastic. And so, I have an official request: I know it’s not actually French, but it’s close enough—how about now we do Scaramouche?
The Count of Monte Cristo is at the Salina Art Center January 10th – 15th.
