A Faithful ‘Monte Cristo’? Don’t Count on It

Monsieur Alexandre Dumas pere

Chateau for 19th Century

Authors of Note

Somewhere above France

Dear Alexandre:

I’m writing this to update you on “The Count of Monte Cristo,” your oft-filmed historical romance about a sailor named Edmond Dantes who emerges from years of imprisonment on a false charge to assume another identity and wreak vengeance on the three men responsible for confining him. As if I had to tell you.

The last time I saw Edmond he was Richard Chamberlain, young, sleek and swashbuckling in 1975, not quite up to Robert Donat’s famed 1934 portrayal but perfectly serviceable as a driven French hero in this lavish TV movie.

Now here’s the latest.

Tonight Edmond is Gerard Depardieu, and your royalty check is in the mail.

You’ll be pleased to learn also that this latest version--a four-night, eight-hour miniseries on Bravo--is not nearly as botched as last year’s movie remake of “The Man in the Iron Mask,” your famous tale about another wrongly jailed victim who ultimately has his day. In 1977, he, too, was played on TV by Chamberlain, incidentally.

For background, Alexandre, this sumptuously mounted French co-production of “Monte Cristo” is part of Bravo’s new strategy to attract bigger audiences with original programming paid for by more frequent commercials, although a lengthy miniseries with subtitles hardly seems tailored to U.S. viewers. Not that subtitles surely don’t beat English dubbing, only that if your eyes are ever diverted from the screen--which may happen here during occasional, uh, tedium--you may miss crucial dialogue.

And with all that time to fill, there is a lot of talking.

As you recall, Alexandre, you did not write complex characters capable of much surprise. They are who they are. Beneath their surface layers lies more surface, and once on course, they pretty much won’t be deterred.

Yet “The Count of Monte Cristo,” like your other major novels, is great, great fun. Although inspired by a true story, it’s an adventure about good defeating evil by improbable means. For Edmond to gain the revenge he seeks each step of the way, plot conveniences must shine him on him like stars. And you make sure they do, Alexandre.

Remember? It’s 1815, and young Edmond, after anonymously being branded a traitor by his rivals Mondego and Danglars, is plucked from his beloved Mercedes in Marseilles and sent by prosecutor Villefort to the gloomy dungeons of notorious Chateau d’If, where he will lay forgotten for 20 years.

You handled that, Alexandre, by having a friendly inmate who dies bequeath Edmond an enormous hidden treasure that Edmond recovers from the island of Monte Cristo when he escapes. Titling himself the Count of Monte Cristo, and using disguises (Depardieu even wears a honker resembling his old Cyrano nose), he uses his vast fortune to reward his friends and bring ruin to his former tormentors. One of them, Mondego who is now a count known as Morcerf, has become the husband of Mercedes, who long ago gave up Edmond for dead.

Old news to you, Alexandre.

You haven’t heard about the widow Camille de la Richardais, though, because she wasn’t in your novel. Didier Decoin, who adapted your story for this production, found Edmond’s life a little drab on the romance front. So he gave him pretty Camille to dabble with.

Not that Edmond is an animal. When she sheds her fragility at one point and comes on to him, he wants nothing of it. “Behave, madam,” he harrumphs.

Edmond reserves his passion for Mercedes, who is ravishing as ever, although no longer “the little savage” he recalls from their youth. And despite his disguises, she gradually figures out that Monte Cristo is really her Edmond.

You won’t be disappointed in the look of “Monte Cristo,” Alexandre. Despite limited to three weeks of shooting, director Josee Dayan has staged your story so stunningly that it’s hard knowing where to begin. A spectacular luncheon at Camille’s country estate, where Edmond plays minds games with his enemies, is one of countless feasts for the eyes.

Congratulations, too, on that fine actor Depardieu, a perfect choice for the wounded but obsessed Edmond. Depardieu has a great affinity for unpretentious, flesh and blood figures, and as Edmond he projects hurt one moment, menace the next. Your characters may be one-dimensional, Alexandre, but Depardieu isn’t.

There are other Depardieus on the screen, too, for his son, Guillaume, appears briefly as the younger Edmond, and his daughter, Julie, plays attorney Villefort’s daughter, Valentine. She is targeted for murder by his poisonous second wife, Heloise, who is mad, Do you hear, Alexandre, MAD!

But you know that.

What you won’t recognize much of are the laborious last four hours of “Monte Cristo,” which are too meandering and convoluted to be rescued even by Gerard Depardieu and such able supporting actors as Ornella Muti as Mercedes, Sergio Rubini as Edmond’s devoted Italian servant Bertuccio, Michel Aumont as Danglars, Pierre Arditi as Villefort and that French basset hound, Jean Rochefort, as Mondego/Morcerf.

And when the beautiful Haidee shows up to put the clincher on Mondego/Morcerf for betraying her father, the Pasha of Janina, all bets are off.

Mon, dieu, huh, Alexandre?

Now that you’ve had nearly 150 years to think about it, Alexandre, shouldn’t you have rewritten your somewhat vague ending that has Edmond sailing away with Haidee and never being seen again?

Here’s the good news. Decoin did it for you.

Scratch Haidee. Decoin ends with those kids Edmond and Mercedes as sweet on each other as ever and happily reuniting on the seashore in Marseilles (actually Malta), where that wide-body Depardieu removes his shirt to wade into the water in a daring act of exposure that no U.S. star of comparable girth would even consider.

Television!

Oh, I forgot, Alexandre, you don’t know what that is. Television in its present form was invented about 60 years ago, for the purpose of destroying literature.

* “The Count of Monte Cristo” begins its four-part run at 8 p.m. tonight on Bravo and continues nightly through Thursday. The network has rated it TV-PG (may be unsuitable for young children).