Sometimes you have the right actor in the right part, but the wrong movie. Such is the case with "Cyrano," Joe Wright's handsome musical version of Edmond Rostand's 19th-century play "Cyrano de Bergerac" (which has frequently been adapted for film; my favorite version being the 1987 Steve Martin comedy "Roxanne"). It's a beautiful story of love and language, in which a poet/soldier (here played by Peter Dinklage) who believes himself to be deformed cannot tell the woman he loves, Roxanne (Haley Bennett), what he feels; instead, he serves as scriptwriter for a handsome yet inarticulate fellow soldier, Christian (Kelvin Harrison Jr.). Roxanne falls hard for Christian's romantic words, not realizing that she truly loves their writer.
Wright's version, set in late-17th-century Italy, is exactly what you'd expect from the director of 2012's "Anna Karenina": It's crowded and whirling and wildly over-the-top theatrical, to the extent that you almost need to go lie down after it's over. (Then again, overstimulation is a welcome new sensation these days.) Wright can't just show us bakers at their work, he has to have them performing a Busby-Berkeley-ish ballet; he can't just show us a letter being sealed, but zooms in dramatically on the dripping wax like it's blood in a horror movie.
None of this muchness is really the problem; where this "Cyrano" falters is in the musical adaptation, which is simply not enough. It's not at all a bad idea to make a "Cyrano" musical — song being, after all, an exalted form of language — but the songs need to be rich and glorious. Here, they're just flat; the rhymes seem plain, the emotions small, the singing voices tight and limited. "Cyrano" should soar when the music begins; instead, it droops.
