Film of the week: 'Count of Monte Cristo'
By Steve Sailer
UPI National Correspondent
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LOS ANGELES, Jan. 24 (UPI) -- With "best picture" hopefuls still going strong
in theaters, January is typically the month in which studios dump new movies
that aren't quite bad enough to go straight to video, but aren't good enough
for release any other time.

That's why the solid, highly entertaining "The Count of Monte Cristo" comes
as a surprise. It offers an enjoyable compromise between the good-for-you but
grim prestige films, such as "Black Hawk Down" and "In the Bedroom," and the
usual January schlock.

Written by Alexandre Dumas (the Father) in 1844, "Monte Cristo" is one of the
most popular novels of all time.

It's been called an airport novel from before there were airports. Although
first filmed in 1908(!), Hollywood hasn't made a big screen version since
Robert Donat's in 1934. This 68-year lag seems oddly long, considering that
Dumas' "Three Musketeers" has been remade twice in the last ten years alone.

The movie's plot is certainly not lacking in incident. An innocent young
French sailor, Edmond Dantès (played by Jim Caviezel, who starred opposite
Jennifer Lopez in "Angel Eyes"), is condemned to the dungeon of the Château
D'If by the machinations of his enemies. They are led by the son of Count
Mondego (portrayed by Guy Pearce), who wants to marry Dantès' fiancé.

The movie comes to life when up through Dantès' cell floor tunnels a fellow
prisoner (Richard Harris). As they dig their way out at the rate of three
inches per week, this urbane priest educates the illiterate youth in the ways
of the world. Finally free years later, Dantès salvages a sunken treasure,
reinvents himself as the elegant but saturnine Count of Monte Cristo, and
rains vengeance down upon the those who did him wrong.

The novel has been hugely influential. Obi-Wan Kenobi is an update of the
naïve hero's mentor in scholarship and swordplay. And Batman, the tormented
Dark Knight, owes a lot to the implacable Count of Monte Cristo.

Mark Twain even parodied it in "Huckleberry Finn." Having overdosed on Dumas,
Tom Sawyer insists that the only proper way to liberate the runaway slave Jim
from the flimsy shed where he's held captive is by spending months digging
him out with tiny case-knives.

After "Memento," the sunken-cheeked Guy Pearce is a hot property, but here he
camps it up a little too much as the drunken twit of a villain.

In contrast, although Richard Harris (who was the Emperor in "Gladiator")
long ago drank away his shot at being the next Alec Guinness or Laurence
Olivier, the old Irishman is wonderfully hammy as the priest.

Perhaps actors from the British Isles are so much better at the grand
theatrical style than Americans because in their old class-based society,
everybody - whether nobleman or yokel - went through life with an assigned
role to play.

For all its delights, however, the novel is an unfilmable 1,400 pages long.
The part that most people remember -- the escape from prison -- comprises
only a small fraction.

Director Kevin Reynolds, who is making a comeback after his career was washed
away by the "Waterworld" disaster, noted, "If we'd been completely faithful
to the novel, we would have had a 30-hour movie."

The unlikely author of the taut screenplay is a TV game show producer named
Jay Wolpert. Although this is his first script to be filmed, he does a
textbook job of finding the spine of the story. Purists will lament that he
tosses in a few melodramatic plot twists of his own, but, somehow, I don't
think Dumas would have minded.

For example, to avoid the novel's lengthy explanation of how the evil Mondego
rises from fisherman to nobleman, Wolpert simply makes him the son of a
count. Then, to add his own psychological twist, Wolpert turns Pearce's
Mondego and Caviezel's Dantès into boyhood best friends. This indeed makes
Mondego's betrayal and Dantès' revenge more emotionally powerful.

Unfortunately, Wolpert's addition also obliterates the class tension that was
the background to most 19th-century European novels: little aristocrats and
little nobodies didn't grow up as best buddies.

Americans, though, don't care much about class. What interests us is race.
So, the film transforms the Italians smugglers who rescue the escaped Dantès
into Puerto Rican pirates. This change allows Luis Guzmán, the strikingly
short and witty character actor from "Traffic," to have a lot of fun playing
the Count's ex-pirate butler.

This Caribbean connection is appropriate, because it reminds us that Dumas's
paternal grandmother was a Haitian slave. In America, Dumas would have been
classified as black, but in France, it never much mattered.

(Rated PG-13 for adventure violence/swordplay and some sensuality.)


Copyright © 2002 United Press International