Mark Reviews Movies: CYRANO

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Review by Mark Dujsik | December 16, 2021

Screenwriter Erica Schmidt, adapting the book of her own 2018 stage show, makes a couple of significant cosmetic changes to playwright Edmond Rostand's Cyrano de Bergerac. In terms of storytelling, the most noticeable shift is that Cyrano is a musical—and a pretty effective one, at that. The songs come from the fraternal duo of Aaron and Bryce Dessner (who may be better known as members of the band the National). Beyond how smoothly the tunes fit into Schmidt's faithful adaptation of the source material, they're also clever in the way they bring Rostand's sense of poetry to this adaptation.

The other dramatic shift is the eponymous character, who has become known, after more than a century of productions and adaptations and re-imaginings of the original 1897 play, as the poetic man with a ridiculously sized nose. Wooing a woman for another man in secret and in shadow through his writing and his words, Cyrano de Bergerac has a place in dramatic history as the most interesting element of one of the most famous scenes in all of theater. He, hiding himself from view, provides the lines for a handsome but dim lover, whose affections are for a woman whose mind would prefer someone more akin to Cyrano.

On its own, that scene is funny and has become the inspiration for countless others like it. For those who might only know the source material from that moment, it doesn't offer the full scope or intention or even mood of the entirety of the story. Many, perhaps, believe the tale to be a comedy, given the size of the hero's snout and the content of its most famous interaction. This, though, is a tragedy of unrequited love, self-sabotage, and that most familiar doubt, which has haunted the mind of likely everyone at one point or another (or consistently): You aren't good enough.

The change for this Cyrano is that he is played by Peter Dinklage, as the great actor is—sans prosthetic proboscis. Our Cyrano is a man whose short physical stature belies his skill as a combatant, with or without a sword, and gives him that creeping, increasingly resounding sense of doubt.

He loves Roxanne (a lovely and quick-witted Haley Bennett), an intelligent woman of former means trying to keep up appearances in 17th century Paris, and has since the two grew up in the same small village. Cyrano knows she appreciates, even adores, his wit. Just as he's working up the courage and the hope that Roxanne could love him as he is, she tells Cyrano that she has fallen in love with Christian (Kelvin Harrison Jr., charmingly sincere as a bit of a goof who becomes wiser from what knows and comes to suspect of Cyrano), a new cadet in the soldier-poet's regiment of the French army.

Because Cyrano loves Roxanne, he cannot come between the lovers. Further, he feels obliged to turn Christian into the man of poetry she dreams him to be—even if that means pretending to be Christian in a series of letters. A controlling nobleman named De Guiche (Ben Mendelsohn), who wants to marry Roxanne, threatens to ruin all of it.

That's the gist of the story, kept as originally plotted and characterized by Rostand, while also given a bit of a more modern edge by Schmidt's dialogue and the Dessners' songs (One of them, for example, has Cyrano engaging in what's essentially a rap battle with a pompous, insulting nobleman—before our protagonist shows just how skilled he is with a blade). The film, directed by the theatrically-minded Joe Wright, is big in its big moments of song and dance, with people in fancy dress moving to the sway of the melodies and choreographed soldiers sparring to the rhythm.

There's a lot of pageantry here, and once we become accustomed to the way Schmidt and the Dessners incorporate these songs into the narrative (The opening tune is thematically on-point but a bit distractingly sappy), they become a natural extension of the tale's underlying emotions and Cyrano's penchant for rhyme. These songs aren't "catchy," but they aren't meant to be. They exist, in some complex compositions and arrangements, to drive our understanding of and appreciation for these characters forward.

The smaller, quieter moments—such as the amusing backs-and-forths between Cyrano, trying to teach his student a thing or two about language, and Christian, who is stumped to recall a word to describe being unable to know what to say, and a trio of soldiers mourning the people and the lives they're about to lose in battle—really resonate here, too. Part of that is Wright's awareness of when a scene requires the bold, widescreen treatment and when it necessitates intimate close-ups. There are a few close-ups here (particularly in that most famous scene, when Cyrano decides to cut Christian out of what's really his conversation with Roxanne) that are genuinely affecting.

Almost all of those moments belong to Dinklage, who's brash as a fighter, cynical as a wit, and truly heartbreaking as an unanswered-because-it's-unspoken lover. Cyrano is determined to make the woman he adores happy and, later, attempts to take his secret plan to two graves. The story's final scene puts all his failures and faults, not on any quality of his physical self, but on a single, tragic flaw of his character: pride.

Cyrano changes just enough about this classic story that it feels renewed. The sad tale's tragic heart, though, remains intact and, through music, becomes amplified.

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