Since "Cyrano de Bergerac" has always been about the superficial nature of appearances, there's something fitting about the exterior renovations that have given rise to Joe Wright's sweet, earnest and sometimes enchanting new "Cyrano." For starters, the movie is a full-blown musical: Its roots lie not only in Edmond Rostand's 1897 play of romantic misdirection but also in a stage show that was written and directed by Erica Schmidt (who adapted the screenplay herself) and features songs and score by members of the National. And Peter Dinklage, who starred in that musical's 2019 off-Broadway production, superbly reprises his role here, giving us a Cyrano who is widely mocked not for an oversized proboscis but rather for a diminutive physique. The insults flung his way may be different, but his sense of social rejection — and his fear that he isn't fit to love — cuts just as deep.
Maybe it even cuts a little deeper. Nearly every screen actor who has taken on Cyrano de Bergerac — among them Jose Ferrer (an Oscar winner for his 1950 performance), Christopher Plummer, Gerard Depardieu, Kevin Kline and Steve Martin, if you count "Roxanne" (and why wouldn't you?) — has donned a fake nose for the occasion, availing himself of prosthetic putty, special effects or some ingenious confection of both. Dinklage comes to the screen with no such enhancements and is all the more poignant for it: What we see onscreen is all him. But it's not just the lack of artificial adornment that makes his Cyrano feel like such an authentic, lived-in creation. It's also the silver-tongued wit, the steel-trap mind, the sense that whatever this Cyrano may lack in physical stature he more than makes up for in intellectual acuity.
Put it another way: Whoever realized that Cyrano de Bergerac could be reconceived as a less frisky, more sober Tyrion Lannister was clearly on to something. "Cyrano," sailing into theaters this week with a PG-13 rating, is decidedly not "Game of Thrones"; no White Walkers are in evidence (though Ben Mendelsohn's scowling, heavily powdered Count de Guiche comes close), and apart from an early duel between Cyrano and a high-society sneerer (Joshua James), the bloodshed is kept to a tasteful minimum. But Cyrano has more in common with Tyrion than a few consonants and vowels. In both cases, the threat of pariahdom has forced a Dinklage character to become the smartest man in the room, deadly with a quip and deadlier still with a blade, as we see when Cyrano deftly fends off a nighttime ambush by one of his many powerful enemies.
