The Problem of Adaption: Count of Monte Cristo

Elliot Fox

I was genuinely thrilled when I first heard about the release of a new mini-series adaptation of Alexandre Dumas’ magnum opus, The Count of Monte Cristo. Maybe more than I should’ve been, but in truth, it felt like something I’d earned.

Back in school, I was always quietly envious of the kids who, in the week before the holidays, would smugly announce that they had actually read the book behind whatever film our teacher was about to put on. Consequently, my experience of watching Charlie and the Chocolate Factory or Fantastic Mr. Fox felt somehow degraded, as if I was accessing culture in a second-hand, diluted form. It left me feeling not just intellectually subordinate, but almost guilty for taking what seemed like a shortcut.

So when I heard about this adaptation and scheduled a visit to my grandparents, who spend the majority of their time exhausting multiple streaming services' catalogues per day, I thought I finally had the chance to redeem that past cultural inferiority and join the ranks of the “I read the book first” crowd. Unfortunately, despite my hopeful enthusiasm, this experience didn’t therapise such intellectual trauma of my childhood. Instead, I was left underwhelmed.

Reading all 1,312 pages of the epic, revenge-themed classic The Count of Monte Cristo not only provided me with a performative achievement I could shamelessly (and perhaps relentlessly) boast about (maybe I’m doing exactly that by writing this) but also instilled in me some timeless wisdom about the more optimistic truths that surround the human experience. These are lessons one might only come to realise after being thrown into a sea-trapped dungeon for decades over a crime they didn’t commit. Like most rich reading experiences, the novel offered me a sweeping, bird’s-eye view of how different temperaments and moral choices shape the course of people’s lives, for better or worse, effectively serving as a practical guide to the consequences of character.

When navigating the internet, it’s easy to stumble across pseudo-profound platitudes, well-intentioned but ultimately hollow. At first glance, a line like “All human wisdom is contained in these two words: wait and hope” could seem to fall into that category. And yet, when those words arrive as the novel’s final statement, crystallising the summit of your immersion in a story of constantly fluctuating fortunes, their truth becomes undeniable. You can’t help but begin to frame your own life differently.

When I finished the book myself, I found its coordinated meditations on revenge lingering in my mind. In fact, I even produced my own fluffy, buzzword-laden reflection- “let their conscience be the executioner”, which I shared, certainly to the bemusement of my Instagram story viewers. But that hardly mattered. Thanks to Dumas, that sentiment had become my truth.

So then, sitting down to watch the series, anticipating I could relive this transformative experience in a more passive and visual way. Why did this not happen? Obviously, generally speaking, these productions are never going to be able to replicate the visions your imagination could construct through reading; such visions are intrinsically linked to your psyche in a reflectively revealing way. But I think there was one glaringly specific problem with this production that especially inhibited this imaginative mistranslation, and I suspect it’s where the majority of their budget was channelled into.

Launching on the relatively new ‘Free’ - but peppered with adverts - streaming service UDave, the producers obviously sought a legitimising starring actor to guarantee the capture of a considerable audience, and therefore Sam Claflin (Hunger Games actor stroke handsome British rom-com extraordinaire) took on the leading role of Edmond Dantès (the Count of Monte Cristo). This prompted the series to be what I would coin ‘protagonistic’, in the blunt sense that we are constantly viewing the world and transitioning through scenes with Sam Claflin (literally, his face is constantly smouldering our screens).

This, unfortunately for those transitioning from the book to the series, undermines the significance of the transformation of our leading character. In the book, a third of the way through, when Dantès’ fortune swivels for the second time and he becomes ‘the Count,’ we begin to navigate the world not alongside him but through those implicated in his search for vengeance. This narrative approach effectively severs our original journey with Edmond as we now encounter him as an entirely new character who’s identity is not explicitly stated. He is first, for instance, encountered twice by the newly introduced characters Franz d’Épinay and Albert de Morcerf during their vacation to Italy. First on the Island of Monte Cristo, he appears exclusively to Franz as an enigmatic, wealthy eccentric named ‘Sinbad the Sailor’, kitted out with all the orientalist motifs of the era; and second, he appears in the aristocratic scene of the theatre boxes of Rome, introducing himself now as the Count, with boys attesting to his gothic, supernatural persona by describing him in vampiric terms.

The effect of this presentation on my imagination was to depict ‘the Count’ as someone entirely abstracted from the youthful, promising young man we were introduced to at the start of the novel as Edmond. In fact, the novel never fully reconciles this transformation with his past love story with Mercédès, the young Catalan who waited for him throughout his years of imprisonment in Marseille. Their relationship never reaches a state of redemption; instead, the Count is left to search for love and meaning within the context of his new identity, one that no longer fits the life he once had.

Unfortunately, and probably unsurprisingly, merely getting Sam Claflin to grow a beard and adopt a more intense, brooding expression couldn’t replicate this impression for me. And maybe that’s why the series ultimately has to conclude with redemption for the Count’s relationship with Mercédès, because with only weak visual cues to convey the psychological weight of his transformation, viewers would likely be confused by his cold rejection of her attempts at reconciliation. Of course, there’s nothing inherently wrong with this alternate ending, but it does highlight how the visual and narrative decisions made in the adaptation obscure one of the most powerful elements of Dumas’s existentialist vision: the paradoxically haunting yet optimistic truth that some losses are so absolute, and some transformations so total, that even love cannot endure them- yet hope survives.