Director Joe Wright has tackled many of the great literary love stories on screen, the ones that we return to again and again for their beauty and their pain, from Jane Austen’s “Pride and Prejudice,” to Tolstoy’s “Anna Karenina.” His latest romantic literary screen adaptation is “Cyrano,” another tale of love and longing that’s been adapted, borrowed and referenced many times on stage and screen, this time with Peter Dinklage in the title role.
Wright’s film is based upon the 2018 stage musical adapted from Edmond Rostand’s 1897 play “Cyrano de Bergerac,” written and directed by Erica Schmidt, with a score and songs by members of the rock band The National. Brothers Aaron and Bryce Dessner composed the music, while National frontman Matt Berninger and his wife Carin Besser wrote the lyrics. Berninger and Besser are not the only spouses to work on the film either.
Schmidt is married to Dinklage, and while she didn’t immediately realize she had her Cyrano at home, there are inherent aspects of the text that Dinklage, as an actor, is suited to express with his self-deprecating wit and hangdog sense of world-weary longing. Schmidt’s script is uniquely attuned to Dinklage’s strengths, his tortured romanticism, and all of that unrequited longing is expressed in song through Berninger and Besser’s lyrics. Portraying Cyrano’s object of affection, Roxane, is Haley Bennett, who is married to Wright (Bennett and Dinklage played these roles in the stage production). The camera is as in love with Bennett as Roxane as Cyrano is with Roxane herself. The entire film is quite the intertwined collaboration.
Audiences will know the story of “Cyrano” well. The play has been adapted into Oscar-winning films in 1950 and 1990 with José Ferrer and Gerard Depardieu playing Cyrano, a man with a distinctively large nose who thinks himself ugly and unworthy of love, using his words to woo the woman he pines for through a more handsome suitor. Steve Martin adapted the story for his 1987 rom-com “Roxane,” and the conceit has been used in teen romance movies like the Netflix flick “Sierra Burgess is a Loser.”
This romantic tragedy crystallizes so much of what makes love universally challenging: insecurities, feelings of unworthiness, pride that gets in the way of true connection. Schmidt’s musical adaptation makes this earnest tale even more nakedly emotional, while Wright’s typically ravishing filmmaking visualizes it’s swooning, disorienting headiness.
Shot in Sicily, Wright utilizes the richly textured production design and Oscar-nominated costumes to create dense and dazzling images bringing us into the world of Cyrano, a swaggering swordsman and wordsmith who expresses his longtime love to Roxane through letters she believes are from Christian (Kelvin Harrison Jr.) a handsome guard with whom she has fallen in love at first sight. Christian loves Roxane as ardently as Cyrano, but lacks the wit to woo such a clever woman.
The constantly roving camera (the cinematographer is Seamus McGarvey) and rapidly layered editing expresses the complications, projections, assumptions and misunderstandings of love; Wright often places the three characters in the same frame to illustrate their interconnectedness. It’s a love triangle that ends in devastation, as the jealous Duke de Guiche (Ben Mendelsohn) spitefully sends Cyrano and Christian off to war, though even war cannot come close to the woe that is the fear holding one back from confessing their real feelings.
This version of “Cyrano” doesn’t change much from the original, but uses the songs and nuances in performance and text to draw out the essential elements of the tale. The energetic and imaginative filmmaking is a delight to behold, but the second half is lacking some connective tissue. It ends abruptly, and while the themes and messages have been repeated, there’s a lack of resolution, making this thoughtful adaptation feel a bit unfinished. But perhaps it’s that sense of a romance unfulfilled that is the true tragedy all along.
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‘CYRANO’
3 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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