The new “Cyrano” movie is an eyeful; but for the ear, more like half-full. But you always take your chances with a musical adaptation of the 1897 Edmond Rostand play. And there have been plenty.
In Rostand’s verse extravaganza, “Cyrano de Bergerac,” the generously nosed poet warrior of the title embarks on an anguished ghostwriting project to help out his fellow soldier, Christian, at the behest of Roxanne, who has fallen in love with Christian at first sight. Cyrano has loved Roxanne privately since they were childhood friends. With his own heart gently weeping, Cyrano composes love letters on behalf of Christian to Roxanne, though, of course, the ruse cannot remain a secret forever.
The source material’s devotion to yearning hearts, nobility, honor and the magic potion of love language makes it irresistible to theatrical practitioners worldwide. All that verse? It’s nearly a musical! Why not just take the leap and let these people sing? It sounds inevitable.
His camera agog and aswirl, director Joe Wright (“Atonement,” “Darkest Hour”) shot the film version of the 2018 stage musical “Cyrano” in some wonderful corners of Sicily. The stripped-down narrative and fluid time signature — 17th century decolletage up against 21st century power ballads, courtesy of composers Aaron Dessner and Bryce Dessner of the alt-rock band The National — locate the action in a Neverland setting of sunny but doomed romance.
Peter Dinklage originated his Cyrano at the Goodspeed Opera House in East Haddam, Connecticut, in 2018, then went off-Broadway in 2019. Erica Schmidt , who is married to Dinklage, directed and wrote the book for that show. Wright enlisted her to do the screenplay for the new film, and here we have it: a swank but errant enterprise, with many confident elements very nearly making up for a movie that doesn’t really benefit from song or dance.
Good things first: Dinklage makes for a wry, compelling, touching Cyrano. His singing voice sits in a low, rumbly register, with a touch of Leonard Cohen, and when Ben Mendelsohn (as De Guiche, the sniveling nobleman determined to have Roxanne for himself) sings of his brutal romantic designs, it’s as if he’s in unspoken competition to out-Cohen Dinklage. Haley Bennett’s Roxanne is effective, too, even as Wright packages her in silhouettes and close-ups, discreetly writhing, like she’s in a Restoration era “Flashdance.” Kelvin Harrison Jr.’s Christian works in easy counterpoint to Dinklage’s Cyrano.
Textual adjustments leave everything nose-related out of Cyrano’s physicality: Dinklage’s dwarfism, in this version, is reason enough in the eyes of Cyrano’s cruel adversaries to render him a “freak.” The songs by the Dessners and lyricists Matt Berninger and Carin Besser include lines like “What has God been smoking?” for Cyrano to mock those who mock him. The movie opens with a variation on the standard “I want” song for Roxanne, which is more of an “I won’t”: “I won’t be ashamed/ I’m nobody’s pet/ No one’s wife/No one’s woman.”
For relative newcomers to this particular story, and for many who already know where it’s going, the film’s solutions will outweigh the problems. At his best, Wright asserts his intoxicating visual instincts for the flow and glide of a busy scene full of extras, animals, alleyways, all of it. He’s well-suited to this genre. All the weirder, then, that around the midpoint — and this is coming from a true lover of musicals — I started imagining the same movie with the same cast not singing or dancing a lick.
There is, however, an unexpected bonus near the end: In the wartime lament “Wherever I Fall,” soldiers sing of their distant loved ones, and the performer introducing the song is none other than Glen Hansard of The Frames and the romantic musical gem “Once.” Dinklage is very much the star of this project, but it’s Hansard who, for a minute or two, turns “Cyrano” into an expressive screen musical.
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‘CYRANO’
2.5 stars (out of 4)
MPAA rating: PG-13 (for some strong violence, thematic and suggestive material, and brief language)
Running time: 2:04
Where to watch: In theaters Friday
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