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.
