Let me preface this by stating that, while I’m not a professional in musical theater, I am a lifelong, genuine fan of musicals. I grew up loving and regularly watching all of the animated and live-action classics from Disney and MGM. So let’s just say my standard for new musical screen productions and adaptations is only a little high.
For modern movie musicals, I loved Damien Chazelle’s La La Land (2016) and Bradley Cooper’s A Star is Born (2018), but did not enjoy Bill Condon’s Beauty & the Beast (2017) or Rob Marshall’s Mary Poppins Returns (2018). With Joe Wright’s new film, Cyrano, I went in with my expectations as moderate as possible. It’s one of those popular interpretations that gives a classic tale a musical twist. Surely, I would appreciate it. Well…
As usual, in most adaptations of Edmond Rostand’s 1897 play Cyrano de Bergerac, we get a love triangle in 1640 Paris. Cyrano (Peter Dinklage) is in love with his longtime, good friend Roxanne (Haley Bennett). But Roxanne is in love with a handsome, new soldier in town named Christian de Neuvillette (Kelvin Harrison, Jr.). Christian loves Roxanne back, but is not great with expressing himself, romantically, with words. Cyrano, on the other hand, is a talented writer and can easily write a love letter as a secret admirer. Through Cyrano’s input, Christian gives Roxanne the impression he is the perfect man for her. At the same time as all of this, Roxanne is also being pressured to marry a rich nobleman — the Count de Guiche (Ben Mendelsohn) — to save her family from bankruptcy.
Cyrano de Bergerac is most famous for the title character being portrayed with an abnormally large nose, which makes him an outsider and considered unattractive by society. In Wright’s film, we have Cyrano appearing as a little person, instead. There have been many versions of this famous story over the years.
A good one that I watched for the first time, recently, is Michael Lehmann’s modernized rom-com The Truth About Cats and Dogs (1996) with a, supposedly, frumpy Janeane Garofalo and model-esque Uma Thurman. The most popular is probably Fred Schepisi’s own modernized rom-com Roxanne (1987) starring Steve Martin and Daryl Hannah. For traditional, costume adaptations, there is Michael Gordon’s Cyrano de Bergerac (1950) and Jean-Paul Rappeneau’s French language Cyrano de Bergerac (1990).
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This new Cyrano is a bit of a passion project between lovers, as Wright and Bennett are in a relationship in real life, and Dinklage and screenwriter Erica Schmidt are married. I don’t mean to sound fully insulting with this comparison but a lot of Cyrano reminded me of the opera sequence in Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane (1941). Wright is Kane, Bennett is Susan Alexander, and we are the audience witnessing the vanity project.
Wright is a good director, as proven with his modern classics Pride and Prejudice (2005) and Atonement (2007), but, seemingly, out of his league in terms of musical direction. I like the fresh take of casting Dinklage as the lead but his vocals are too limited to showcase songs beyond his range. This is a little odd considering the actor and Schmidt originated this as an off-Broadway stage musical in 2018 before reworking it as a motion picture. Bennett is very talented as both an actress and singer, and probably the best part of the cast.
Like with Ridley Scott’s The Last Duel (2021), Wright allowed the actors to sound fancy with their real voices, rather than put on fake French accents. So, everyone here either sounds American or British, except for Australian Mendelsohn, who chose to give his character an English accent. I like this old-fashioned throwback to how costume dramas used to be filmed in the old Hollywood era, so the inconsistent dialects didn’t bother me.
I’m not a fan of the indie-folk-rock band The National, so I can’t compare their compositions here to their usual music. But I found the musical numbers lacked theatricality and sounded more like soft rock songs, though they aren’t necessarily terrible. Seamus McGarvey’s cinematography, Sarah Greenwood’s production design and Massimo Cantini Parrini & Jacqueline Durran’s costume designs were lovely to look at, and I can see why Parrini & Durran were the sole Oscar nomination for this film.
I’ve called films mixed bags before, but I think Cyrano might be the biggest example of the term so far this year.
Do you like movie musicals or Cyrano de Bergerac? Does the new musical adaptation look interesting to you? Let us know in the comments!
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