What's the ripest thing about this movie?
Well, there's the part where James
Frain, as a magistrate, holds up a sealed letter and asks its
bearer, "Have you read this?" Edmond Dantes (Jim
Caviezel), solemnly intoning that his all-consuming desire is
"revenge," is told by his hearty Corsican friend (Luis
Guzman), "Okay. Revenge. Who?" Dagmara Dominczyk, as
Dantes' girlfriend, says, referring to a Higher Being, "He is
in everything. Even in a kiss." Dantes walks up to some guests,
at a party hosted by someone else, and says, "So glad you could
come and see me!..." One character surprises another with
information about a murder which the first character could not
possibly have been privy to. Some cargo is stolen from a ship, but
we don't know who it belonged to in the first place (this is an
essential part to the story). It is then hidden in a secret hiding
place that everybody seems to know about.
But, no -- The topper has to be the
part, early in the film, where Dantes and Mercedes (Dominczyk's
character) are sitting together by a campfire on the beach. After
some romantic tete-a-tete ("Make love to me." "Will
you ever give up?"), she says she has to have a serious
commitment from him -- men act like little boys, demanding, only to
discard, playthings like ponies and whistles, and, Mercedes
declares, "I will not be your whistle!" Alas! Dantes is
but the meager "son of a clerk," and can't give her
something fancy like an engagement ring. So, Mercedes promptly rips
some thread from the hem of her skirt and, there! The thread becomes
her ring, and, moreover, she says, it "will never leave my
finger."
Now, while it is known that, prior
to the advent of indoor plumbing and modern hygiene, bathing was not
a daily occurrence among many people in the early 19th century,
either Mercedes must not do a whole lot with her hands or that would
have to be some mighty sturdy thread. Years pass, many of them,
during which Mercedes obtains, then discards, a husband (no big deal
-- he never "pleased" her, anyway, she says
euphemistically), and she and Dantes are reunited, during which she
holds up her hand to show -- yes! -- that same thread is still
around the very same finger where she put it. Good to her word, she
reasserts it "never left my finger."
These lighthearted moments come in
handy, because otherwise this film -- which seems not so much
adapted as yanked from the novel by Alexandre Dumas père -- is a
serious-minded affair, heavy on atmospherics and not all that fun.
The story -- in which young Dantes is wrongfully accused of a crime,
imprisoned, escapes, and then sets out to settle some scores with
the aid of a fabulous treasure at his disposal -- is reduced to a
welter of confusion, illogical, contradictory, and strewn with
dangling plotlines, holes, and plausibility gaps (particularly the
method shown in the film of Dantes' escape, which he would have had
to have been psychic to engineer). Some films suffer from having not
enough plot; this one has more than it knows what to do with.
The film lays out some huge period
recreation scenes -- an outdoor party, a landing by hot-air balloon,
a formal dinner, a festival with masqued revelers, and a decent into
the Roman catacombs -- only to dump out of them before we've even
had much of a time to get a good look at them. And there doesn't
seem to be much of a point in putting on a swashbuckler if the sword
fights are clumsy. Perhaps aiming for verisimilitude, the filmmakers
have the combatants lurch and flail about, and at least one fight
ends up degenerating into a brawl. Maybe they felt that the fights
Errol Flynn and Basil Rathbone took part in during earlier films
were too graceful, but that was one of the reasons people were drawn
to them in the first place.
The other reason was that actors
such as Flynn and Rathbone gave their heroes and villains the proper
dimension. Jim Caviezel, squinting his eyes like a lizard who's
about to fall asleep, doesn't give young Dantes the right ingenuous
quality that would explain why he would feel profoundly betrayed
after he gets into the fix he's in (Caviezel seems more like a
nitwit, in fact, than ingenuous). After spending years in jail,
subsisting on nothing but slops, he grows a fetchingly long beard
and hair, but mysteriously never seems to lose any weight or body
tone. And when he emerges, ostensibly a "changed man,"
Caviezel doesn't really look or sound any different than he did
before he went in.
His outrage over the way his
friend, Fernand, betrays him doesn't hold any weight because the
film depicts Fernand as being deceitful and untrustworthy right from
the start. Guy Pearce, who plays Fernand, gives a smirking, lazy,
astonishingly awful performance -- his upper lip seems to be
constantly curled -- especially in light of his recent work in
"Memento." Here, he doesn't seem to mind or care that he's
pickling himself in overacting.
Review by Gregory Avery · Nitrate Online
