Cyrano (2022)

Score: 3.5 / 5

When I heard the story of Cyrano de Bergerac had been adapted into a new musical, the news was terribly exciting. It's much modernized, of course, from the 19th-century play, but still largely made to look period. The primary updates are twofold: first with the addition of music, and second with the casting of Peter Dinklage as the title character. Why is this significant? Well, anyone familiar with the story would tell you that Cyrano is most known as the story of a French soldier and poet and musician with an enormous nose. The character has internalized the ugliness projected onto him by society and decided that he is unworthy of love; when he falls in love with the beautiful and lonely Roxanne, it is from behind the ink and pages of their correspondence.

Erica Schmidt's adaptation (on stage and now on screen) changes Cyrano's source of melancholy, away from the traditional nose issue -- often played with obnoxiously, laughably large prosthetics -- to profoundly brilliant effect. With Dinklage in the role, his stature becomes the target of derision and scorn, providing the story a sobering dose of realism and relatability in 2022. It helps, surely, that Schmidt and Dinklage are married and probably worked on this material together as a labor of love before putting it on the boards. Dinklage imbues boldness and unabashed romantic heft into every beat as the iconic character, and it's his "biggest" role yet, emotionally and performatively speaking. He even gets his chance -- thanks surely to the director -- to have a smattering of the sort of swashbuckling scenes that made Errol Flynn and other studly stars the romantic leads of old Hollywood classics. The handsome Christian, Cyrano's rival in love for Roxanne who is not given the comedic opportunities he deserved (and that this film desperately needs), is played by Kelvin Harrison Jr., while Roxanne's courtier, the foppish Duke, is played surprisingly well by Ben Mendelsohn. The lady herself is played by a charming Haley Bennett, who fits the musicality of the film much better than her co-stars.

It's all sort of cutesy and sweet, but it never really coalesces into a satisfying cinematic experience. True, it has been almost entirely reimagined visually -- by the visionary genius of director Joe Wright -- and so it resembles almost nothing, I imagine, of the stage musical in any practical way. But I suspect it wouldn't be satisfying on stage either, unless Schmidt botched her own work in translating it to screen. The music itself is atrocious, with every song performed in the same tempo and almost always a similar key. There are no variations between song style, rhythm, harmony, or content. No songs advance the plot, introduce characters, or offer spectacle; instead, they serve as Shakespearean soliloquies, allowing characters to express deep emotional revelations. This might be effective in opera, but not musical theatre. Further, the lyrics to the songs are endlessly, annoyingly repetitive, often with a single phrase or couplet repeated many times in the background like a contemporary Christian band. 

Thankfully Wright handles the numbers quite well, allowing gentle choreography to inform the background of each song, with unlikely ensemble members dancing as if they were in a Regency-era ball. Two especially well-shot numbers -- thank you, cinematographer Seamus McGarvey -- will stick in my brain for a while; the first is in Christian's first song, as rows of soldiers dance with their fencing blades on the parapets of a seaside fort, and the second is when the Duke approaches Roxanne for what he intends to be the night of their consummation through the dark, foggy streets. These kinds of visual flourishes provide depth and artistry to a film otherwise devoid of meaningful inspiration. Sound harsh? Check the repeated use of shots of various characters running down alleys as papers (presumably love letters) flutter in the air around them, as if the production designers were determined to recreate the opening scenes of Chris Columbus's Rent. 

It's not "bad," of course, and sometimes it's effective in absorbing your full sensual attention. The trio song of letter-writing, when the papers start to fly around, is a downright sexy sequence, and many repeated shots of Roxanne on her bed caressing her letters are pretty erotic. Wright could have leaned more into the conceptual conceit of isolating his characters more until the crucial moments that they do finally connect, obviously through letters but even more importantly when in person. Filming in this way might have helped make the narrative more dynamic and more accessible for younger audiences as well as audiences hungry for a nice period romance after two years of pandemic-related isolation where we so often relied on written words to keep us all connected.