Wait, and hope

On adolescence, endings, and the Count of Monte Cristo

I watched the 2024 French film version of the Count of Monte Cristo on a plane three weeks ago, when life was markedly different. It was excellent. It’s a gorgeous epic with drama and cinematography that seems out of the 1960s in the best way, landscapes and mansions and duels and incredibly blue waves.

For those of you unfamiliar with the story: Edmond Dantès, a young sailor, is about to marry his sweetheart Mercédès when he’s framed for a serious crime by three men. He spends fourteen years jailed in an island fortress, where a priest mentors him and teaches him myriad skills and leaves him a location of a fortune before he dies. When Dantès escapes, he finds the fortune and refashions himself as the mysterious Count of Monte Cristo. He begins, with some protegees, to enact an elaborate revenge plot on the men who wronged him, one of whom, Fernand, is now married to and has a teenage son with Mercédès. Dantès spends years finding information, disguising himself, and honing his skills to carry out protracted, meticulously planned psychological warfare. And it turns out he's very, very good at it. But revenge is a dangerous business for the soul…

I read the book when I was fourteen, the summer before my freshman year of high school, more than half my life ago. It was the book that got me into 19^th-century literature.¹ It is a rare film that can make you feel the same as you did when you were fourteen, the same delight, edge-of-your-seat drama, wondering — then, because I did not know the story, and now, because all the plot points were shrouded in the hazy fog of memory — what will happen next, the next step in the perfect revenge that Edmond Dantès will exact upon his enemies.

My best friend in English class, who is kind and beautiful, loved Mercédès. I, possessed of other traits, pictured myself as Dantès. In my mind, he is never the Count, never the mask — always Dantès.²

Revisiting a story a lifetime later is an odd experience. It allows you to see the ways in which you’ve changed, and not changed, the stories that resonate with you still. Revenge appeals to a bullied adolescent, a fate-tossed adult. I understand now how long fourteen years is; at fourteen, how could I? The memories of early childhood were already slipping. In adulthood, I haven’t lasted two years before being forced into the unknown, and to come of age and sorrow. Part of me is still in St. Andrews, part of me on a hill in San Francisco, all that I have been and have loved, scattered, my resume with its places and skills — what have you not done? People sometimes ask. On the cusp of 30, I’ve lived a dozen lives.

I still find myself drawn to the revenge plot, but now, even more than before, I know that a life of revenge is no life at all, that hatred will consume all that is good and beautiful and makes life worth living.

Dantès remains impossibly cool. But Mercédès, eschewing revenge for forgiveness, is right.

Note: Beyond the photo are spoilers for book and film! Caveat lector. If you’ve not yet read the book and watched the film and care about spoilers, I recommend stopping here.

Anaïs Demoustier and Pierre Niney in The Count of Monte-Cristo (2024)

Alongside a few changes that were inevitable for a three-hour-long version of a 1000+ page book for which the author(s) were paid by the word, the book and the 2024 movie have very different endings, and other adaptations have different endings still.³

There is an interesting question here, and in all adaptations with liberties, about the extent to which a story can be changed before it is no longer the same story.

I think the most important thing in an adaptation is understanding the heart of a story.⁴ Pride and Prejudice must have Elizabeth and Darcy overcoming their pride and prejudice before coming together in marriage. The Count of Monte Cristo must make it clear both that revenge corrodes the soul and yet, redemption is possible.

The Count of Monte Cristo in the original and most adaptations⁵ is told from the perspective of an antihero at best, a villain at worst; and yet, because the audience has been privy to his whole backstory, the audience is sympathetic to him until it hits them that in addition he’s ruining the lives of innocent people, and himself. How an adaptation balances this is important.

I think the worst mistake an adaptation of this book can make — film is particularly susceptible to this because it's somewhat harder to show different characters’ inner lives — is to make the audience too sympathetic to Dantès’ revenge, and thus give the lesson that actually revenge does pay and if someone has wronged you you can destroy them, and use other people as pawns, and then get everything you ever wanted and be happy.

In a film adaptation, how the story ends is very important to this. It's why I don't, despite my love for a lost love story, like what people call the Mercédès ending, where Dantès and Mercédès get back together. I don't think there's a clear way to do this while keeping the heart of the story, and it also does Mercédès, who is the heart of the book, dirty by having her married first to Fernand, who is awful, and then to unrepentant Dantès, who is also awful, and trying to frame it as a good thing. Neither the book nor the 2024 film end this way, which is good, so let’s see how they do.

In the book, at Mercédès’ behest Dantès spares Mercédès and Fernand’s son Albert; Fernand kills himself; Dantès enacts financial revenge on Danglars, one of the other men who wronged him, but otherwise forgives him; and Dantès ends up marrying his protegee Haydée.

In the 2024 film, Dantès spares Albert, taking the honourable and redemptive action as in the book, but from there it diverges. Dantès spares Fernand in a duel (that doesn’t happen in the book) so that Fernand has to live with his fate instead of dying a hero; the fate of Danglars after Dantès financially ruins him is unclear; and Haydée falls in love with Albert, and he her, and they are able to go and start a life together — to paraphrase Dantès, they can live the life that Mercédès and Dantès were unable to live.⁶ Dantès ends up back on the seas — still missing something because of the revenge that has consumed his life, still not whole, but, having finally done the right thing, on his way. The same as in the book, Dantès writes a letter to Mercedes. The film ends with a visual reminder of Dantès being betrayed by a letter hidden in a Bible, with Mercédès receiving and reading his hopeful letter in a Bible.

There are some issues I have with the adaptation,⁷ notably that what happens with Danglars is confusing and rushed, but otherwise I was happy with the changes, happy with both endings.

I was surprised but intrigued with the changes to Fernand’s story, and similarly surprised, but delighted, with the Haydée and Albert ending. I like to think that in this version Dantès and Mercédès find each other after he spends some time soul-searching at sea, but the film leaves this ambiguous.⁸

An ambiguous ending is a more modern ending.⁹ It is particularly interesting because the rest of the film does not shy away from the melodrama, hijinks, and coincidences that are timeless and key to the feel of the book.¹⁰ The book has deep themes, to be sure, but it’s also a thriller where a lot of wild things happen, and most of both the book and film are not particularly high on the ambiguity.

Neither Fernand, through death, nor Dantès, through a new love, gets a final satisfying ending in the film; both have their actions weighing on them, and there is hope for both. In the book, Dantès almost literally becomes reborn as a new man with a new woman; in the film, he becomes a better and more sombre version of himself, still in love with the woman he has always loved.

While I like both endings, I resonate a bit more with the modern, more ambiguous one. I am modern, this is my bias.

And maybe — this is how I feel now when I am thirty tomorrow, when my own life is still ambiguous, when I have learned lessons from life about letting go and forgiving, of living with a discerning and hopeful eye to the past and future, but the lessons are still settling in uncomfortably, like a new pair of boots. Perhaps I’ll go back to the original ending, or another, in fourteen years and say, ahh, this captures the heart of the story and it all makes sense to me — isn’t that the beauty of a story many times retold?

For those purists who don’t like changes to endings, I often find myself among you. But I think that while the modern ending is more sombre and ambiguous, it carries the main messages of the book around revenge, redemption, and renewal. The final scenes of the film — Haydée and Albert starting a new life, Mercédès in a convent, Fernand ambiguously alive, and Dantès on his ship — powerfully set the scene for the last words of both the film and book:

“L'humaine sagesse était tout entière dans ces deux mots: attendre et espérer”

“All human wisdom is contained in these two words: “wait, and hope”.”

1. A note that this probably makes me hopelessly biased. One of my favourite things about both book and film is that they are both totally awesome. It was a brilliant decision by the English teachers to give fourteen-year-olds this book to introduce them to classic literature, and it is a brilliant film that can recapture the wonder of a nerdy fourteen-year-old for someone much older and jaded. Look at these stills! Why is there a wolf dog? I don’t even remember if it’s in the book and in retrospect it probably doesn’t make much sense, but I did not question it. This has led to the perhaps questionable narrative choice in this essay of a full essay with flow and a shadow stream-of-consciousness essay that is much more 2000s fandom (complete with anime) in the footnotes.

2. In the fifteen years since we read the book in high school, my friend has gotten married and moved to where she wanted to be and has a family, like she always wanted. I traveled the world and had my adventures, like I did. That’s probably where the parallels end, except, I suppose, that we might try to live the stories that we saw ourselves in as children.

3. I may well go on a binge watch of every single adaptation of the Count of Monte Cristo. There is, apparently, a space anime version of the book, which is the next version I want to watch; I am convinced this is the perfect modern adaptation. Speaking of the heart of the story, it’s told from the perspective of Mercédès and Fernand’s son Albert, which seems like the perfect perspective flip to hammer home the worst parts of the revenge and the innocents in its wake.

4. This is why I think Clueless is such a brilliant adaptation of Emma — it’s one of the Austen adaptations that truly understands the social satire/humour and earnest moral heart of the book, that Emma/Cher really does need to go through character growth and consider the needs of others, and herself, before her happy ending.

5. Except, apparently, the space anime version, which is why I want to watch it. Also look at the artwork!

6. Something I see in many reviews is that the Haydée ending was changed because of the age gap, but I think the change to the more ambiguous Mercédès-sort-of ending, with Haydée and Albert living a life free from the sins of the fathers, was something more deliberate and profound. The film, I believe, already makes some changes to Haydée’s backstory to give her a more personal connection to the revenge plot (something that I thought was completely in the spirit of the novel’s contrivances!); they could’ve made her ten years older and had her get together with Dantès and it wouldn’t have changed the original ending at all while being more in line with modern sensibilities. This makes me think it was a deliberate change. Plus, this is a French film! I suspect the fear of age gaps wasn’t too much of a consideration.

7. The less-serious footnotist loves the duels, simply because (fictional) duels are awesome. The more-serious essayist says that duels are actually not key to the book and the Fernand one in particular probably detracts from the plot — the fact that the duels are thwarted in the book actually is important to how the revenge plot plays out. Duels are never key to Dantès revenge; his psychological warfare is well-adapted to screen.

The Albert duel plot change in the 2024 film essentially doesn’t change anything thematically and probably makes it a stronger and more dramatic film than it would’ve as a straight adaptation of the book. The Fernand plot is trickier, as it essentially reverses what happens in the book. Dantès does not beat Fernand in a duel in the book as there is no duel, but Fernand kills himself; while in the film Dantès does beat him, but spares him. I think it fits with the modern, more ambiguous ending that Fernand lives, but was a duel really the best way to do this narratively? It was one of the weaker parts of the film.

But we are in the footnotes essay so, waiving all argument, we take the good old-fashioned ground that the whale is a fish and duels in film are awesome.

8. My fourteen-year-old shipping (a fandom term short for “relationshipping”, talking about couples you wish would get together) heart aside, I think the Haydée ending is better, all things considered, than an unambiguous Mercédès ending — that’s too easy for Dantès! You enact your revenge plan which is wildly successful, your ex’s husband dies, and so then you can get back with your ex while still being within the good graces of the church? Does anyone learn anything in that version? Does revenge really corrode or is it just totally awesome? However, this is explicitly not what the 2024 version is doing — so I appreciate it. The Haydée and Albert ending is apparently more-maligned, but in my opinion it was delightful; I was completely surprised but I thought it fit well with the book’s message.

9. One review I read said something with the gist of: “In this adaptation Dantès gets to explore the world by myself with all his wealth, he learns nothing”. As someone who has done that, bracketing some of the wealth, I say it sounds cool, it is sometimes cool, but it is very lonely, and to most people unsustainable for a lifetime. Whatever issues you have at home — by yourself, far from home, they will eat you alive. Dantès, with all the pain he has caused, is going to be exploring the world with a tortured conscience no matter how wealthy he is; it mirrors, in some ways, the revenge he inflicted on Fernand by sparing his life and making him live with the memory of his transgressions. From my perspective, the film ending is a decidedly more ambiguous and somewhat sadder (for the present) ending than either the ending where he goes off into the sunset with Haydée or the one where he gets back together with Mercédès.

10. Some of the reviews I read criticized the film for the hijinks and I wondered if we had read the same book.