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Cyrano is in exclusive Los Angeles theaters on December 17 and select theaters in the United States on January 21.
There’s a reason Edmond Rostand Cyrano de Bergerac’s drama remains so relevant more than 100 years after its first narrative. Watching an underdog with an unsightly physical appearance successfully outsmart and charm his peers, then loving the woman of his dreams is inherently a good time. Now, director Joe Wright has given the oft-told story a fresh injection of creativity by adapting Erica Schmidt’s 2019 on-screen musical starring Peter Dinklage as Cyrano. Unfortunately, despite some good performance, this adaptation does not perform as well as expected.
Following the same arc of Rostand’s original story, Wright and Schmidt make only slight adjustments to his bones, such as changing Cyrano’s “disease” from having a garish nose to what he describes himself as a ” dwarf “. Despite her talent for language and strategy, her petite stature fuels her crippling self-doubt in an area, which still woos her distant cousin, best friend and sweetheart of her life, Roxanne (Haley Bennett).
And if we’re to be honest, Roxanne is inherently a problematic female character. While her position in life and time makes her a commodity to man’s whims, there is an admirable quality for her in wanting to be more than just candy and related to someone she is. can like. But story machinations often reduce her to the shallow end of the pool when it comes to her lifestyle choices. In this adaptation, she is portrayed as fickle and gorgeous, run entirely by her overly dramatic heart. She knowingly lets herself be wooed by a fat guy like Count De Guiche (a suitably smooth Ben Mendelsohn) because of her money and her access, while she has no intention of accepting his imminent proposal.
And then she falls in love at first sight with a single glance at the young soldier, Christian (Kelvin Harrison Jr.), then uses Cyrano’s obvious affection for her to get him to orchestrate a reunion so that ‘they meet. And he is so in love with her, that he then helps to feed Christian, who has neither spirit nor gentle language to woo, words which will make Roxanne fall even more madly in love with the beautiful fiber of her dreams. Even if you don’t know the details of the story, it’s safe to say that the ruse only gets more complicated as a love quadrangle involving Roxanne, Christian, Cyrano, and De Guiche is often played out as a simple prank. But Cyrano grapples with the real issues as the war quickly encroaches on their reality and the three men are forced to leave Roxanne behind as their lives are on the line.
Maybe letting the story lean towards the tragic rather than the comedic is where this adaptation of Cyrano kicks off. If Wright has an Achilles heel in his direction of period plays, it’s his propensity to embrace theatrical staging and faithfully translate it straight to the screen, which can make you wince. He likes to use all musical tropes, such as featuring peasants dancing outside a car or choreographing soldier training exercises like dance numbers. Depending on the viewer, it’s either going to draw you in or knock you out of the moment, and it was in the latter camp for me. The characters just walk into the song and don’t do it anymore, and the effectiveness of that is based entirely on the prowess of the singers. Bennett and Harrison Jr. do well on that front, both possessing incredible voices that seduce. Dinklage and Mendelsohn have hesitant voices, so they settle for more naturalistic approaches, which work for their characters but don’t make for great listening.
However, the film and the entire cast, especially Dinklage, all excel when they act, that’s all they’re asked to do. Cyrano often finds his rhythm when he doesn’t get into the song, and the scenes between the actors are all about the text and the depth of emotion they share with each other. And that’s pretty telling, because musicals are meant to use the song as a vehicle for the truest representation of what the characters are going through. The songs don’t do so well here in their lyrics or performance. The format even toned down the iconic first act sequence when Cyrano dresses pompous actor Montfleury and then faces off against prig Valvert. Wright and Schmidt turn Cyrano’s legendary bashing into a rap, which is not easy to follow, and ends up being entirely one-sided, which lessens the joy of discovering in the moment how smart, fast, and living.
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The film gains momentum as it finds how to balance the story with the songs in the third act and hits a real home run with the soldier’s heart-wrenching farewell song “Where I Fall”. Sung before a doomed battle, it is both intimate and authentic in a way that feels deeply authentic to the moment of the film and the emotions it is meant to capture and reflect. This is also where Harrison Jr. really makes his portrayal of Christian something special, reframing the man often seen simply as an empty-headed himbo into a truly heroic character who makes his destiny something to be truly needed. to care to the same extent as that of Cyrano.
Aesthetically, if you admire any of Wright’s previous films, then you know the man knows how to stage and film the hell of a richly decorated period room. His adaptations of Pride and Prejudice (2005) and Anna Karenina (2012) are visually sumptuous, and Cyrano follows in their footsteps. And like he and longtime production designer Sarah Greenwood did with these two films, they anchored the noblest elements of the world and Cyrano’s story with the grungy of reality, dirty women in their magnificent dresses in the city streets with the bloody truths of war on a battlefield. And its cameras are always on the move, which makes it an attractive watch no matter if the songs or their staging don’t always hit the mark. Plus, Massimo Cantini Parrini’s costumes are to die for, and his cinematographer Seamus McGarvey knows how to film them and the environments that best frame them, whether it’s a well-appointed living room or a living room. ‘an austere landscape, white and gray at the dawn of war.
In the end, Cyrano works well when the actors are able to be in the moment, most of the time without the artifice of musical numbers. Some hit pretty well, but the scenes that stick with you are mostly the ones with just the actors talking to each other and doing what they do best with just the music of their own talents guiding them.
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