Have you seen the best book-to-screen adaptation of the year? That may be an arrogant claim to make at this early date, especially with Christopher Nolan’s highly stratospherically anticipated The Odyssey coming this July, but I’m confident you’ll agree. It’s the one based on a novel published in the 1840s — a classic that has been previously adapted into dozens of films and TV series, but has now been thrillingly reconceived by an Oscar-winning director and some of Hollywood’s best working actors.
You might be relieved to hear that I’m not talking about the quotation-adorned “Wuthering Heights,” though that movie funnily enough does check all the same boxes. I haven’t had a chance to see Emerald Fennell’s polarizing take on Emily Brontë’s masterpiece myself, but reviewers have made it clear the hype around the Saltburn director’s follow-up was as solid as the fog rolling across the Yorkshire moors. Justin Chang at The New Yorker noted that it “fall[s] short of its source material’s ambitions,” while Clarisse Loughrey at The Independent put it more bluntly: “it’s an astonishingly hollow work.”
Sometimes, the hype machine that movie studios set in motion to turn their marquee films into “event viewing” can backfire. I have a hard time believing that the backlash to “Wuthering Heights” would have been quite so vociferous if prospective viewers weren’t inundated with steamy ads promising “the greatest love story of all time.” But the opposite can happen too, where a title you’ve never heard of but take a chance on can quickly become an obsession.
That was the case for me with The Count of Monte Cristo, a new TV adaptation of the Alexandre Dumas story presented by Masterpiece on PBS. As a member with access to PBS Passport, I’ve watched four out of the eight episodes already before the official broadcast debut on March 22 (the series is also available now through PBS Masterpiece on Prime Video), and the fact that I’m taking the time to write about about it now instead of skipping out on work to binge the rest should be seen as a triumph of will — much like the story of the main character here, Edmond Dantès — because this is a literary adaptation that’s actually worth obsessing over.
I won’t pick favorites between Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, which was published in 1847, and Dumas’s The Count of Monte Cristo, which was originally published in French in serialized form from 1844 to 1846, but when it comes to translating the complexity of these literary characters to the screen, there’s no debate.
Despite the A-list status of Jacob Elordi, who stars as Heathcliff in “Wuthering Heights,” Helena Hunt wrote in The Ringer that “it seems like Fennell is basking in the glowing, happy light of…teenage daydreams rather than trying to paint a more difficult picture of a more difficult man.”
Meanwhile, Sam Claflin’s take on Edmond Dantès, who becomes the titular Count of Monte Cristo, as directed by two-time Palme d’Or winner Bille August has evoked a storm of emotions I never thought I could feel for one character in just four episodes of television: elation, horror, pity, sorrow, glee and, most recently and surprisingly, revulsion. The plot at the heart of this story is what will likely draw you in, but it’s Claflin’s deft portrayal of a man shackled to impossible circumstances, rather than one who’s been freed of complexity, that will keep you coming back.
The Historical Masterpiece Actually Worth Waiting a Decade For
Hint: it’s not “Gladiator II”Even if you’ve never read the book or seen one of the many movie adaptations, you probably know the basic story of Monte Cristo, seeing as how the archetypal revenge story has inspired and been imitated throughout pop culture, in revered works across genres from The Princess Bride to Oldboy.
The tale follows Edmond Dantès, who starts out the novel in 1815 as the newly minted captain of a ship, but jealousy from a fellow shipmate as well as a soldier who covets Dantès’s fiancée Mercédès ends in a scheme, aided by the ladder-climbing prosecutor Gérard de Villefort, where our hero is accused of treason, thrown in an island prison off the coast of Marseille and left for dead. When he escapes 15 years later, pocketing his cellmate’s map of hidden treasure on the island of Monte Cristo, he has one goal in mind with his newfound riches: inflicting commensurate pain on his enemies.
If the name of our Dantès here doesn’t ring a bell, you may know Claflin through his stint as Finnick Odair in the Hunger Games series or more recently in leading roles in the series Daisy Jones & the Six and Vanished. For Monte Cristo to succeed, though, you need more than a charismatic revenge seeker; you need proper adversaries for him to face.
Thankfully, one of those is English actor Blake Ritson, whose wily portrayal of Oscar van Rhijn helps The Gilded Age sizzle; here he plays Danglars, the crewmate in line for captain before Dantès is promoted, with a similarly quiet Machiavellianism. Another is Danish actor Mikkel Boe Følsgaard, who is new to me, but plays prosecutor Villefort as both a steely agent of the crown and a man who’s lost all humanity during his quest for power.
The producers did wrangle an A-list name here, too: Oscar, Emmy and Tony winner Jeremy Irons as Abbé Faria, who is imprisoned alongside Dantès. When one episode is devoted almost entirely to Faria and Dantès in their cells, it’s imperative to cast two actors who can carry the weight of 60 minutes of screentime as well as embody years of solitary confinement in their bones — and this Monte Cristo accomplished that with one of our great living actors and a leading man who should be more of a household name. Hopefully this series will catapult Claflin into that acting echelon.
This take on The Count of Monte Cristo has everything you hope for from a historical adventure epic: danger on the high seas, passionate romance, daring escapes, hidden treasure and well-spun webs of vengeance. Like Wuthering Heights, the series also stitches together its dramatic storyline in sumptuous fabric: as noted by PBS, August shot his adaptation on location in Italy, Malta and France, and even filmed the prison scenes “in a building the same age as the Château d’If,” the real fortress of the story. The cinematic grandeur of this series is easy to appreciate.
The lessons from Dantès’s tireless pursuit of vengeance? Those are not so easily summed up by a trailer tagline. Monte Cristo may indeed be “the greatest revenge story of all time,” and this will certainly be in the running for the definitive screen adaptation of it, but just when you think this is a clear-cut story of heroes and villains, Claflin’s Dantès shows a new facet of himself, one that will make you rethink the man you were cheering for, and the ideals he embodies.
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