Joe Wright is at his best when he’s making movies about love. They may not always have a happy ending. In fact, they usually don’t. But truly romantic movies seem to be a rarer and rarer thing in contemporary cinema and, like Max Ophuls and Jacques Demy before him, Wright is almost peerless in his ability to make an audience swoon and suffer in maximalist splendor.
“Cyrano” is one of his finer efforts among a flock of high achievers including “Atonement” and “Pride & Prejudice.” And this lush adaptation of Edmond Rostand’s classic play “Cyrano de Bergerac” feels like it was made by people who are IN love, which could be at least partially attributed to the fact that the creatives behind the camera were with the ones in front: Wright is married to Haley Bennett, who plays Roxanne, and the screenwriter, Erica Schmidt, is married to Peter Dinklage, who plays Cyrano.
