Cyrano de Bergerac is a story that seems to lend itself very well to the movie musical format, to the point I’m kind of shocked it hasn’t been done yet. It’s been done as an opera plenty of times, which makes a lot of sense -the original 1897 play was written entirely in verse and the story has more than enough operatic emotionality. It’s also been done as a stage musical a number of times, most notably in the 90’s when a Dutch version found modest success on Broadway. Another stage musical, much less successful though more curious, was produced in 2018, written by Erica Schmidt with music contributed by the band The National, and starring her husband Peter Dinklage in a slight re-working of the story where instead of Cyrano’s doubts and low self-worth stemming from a nasal deformity it is merely the stigma surrounding his dwarfism. I don’t know that this show did very well, the reviews I could find weren’t terribly enthusiastic. But one thing it certainly had was the connections to widen its’ reach. Dinklage has star-power and his Roxanne from the production, Haley Bennett is married to filmmaker Joe Wright. Combined they had enough capital to bring their show to the big screen and they did.
And Cyrano does have shades of a kind of vanity project for its’ writer and star in particular, but I might be inclined to believe they’d have much preferred to do it on film from the beginning. Cyrano de Bergerac is of course no stranger to film (Jose Ferrer won an Oscar for his Cyrano in 1950, and since then actors like Steve Martin and Gerard Depardieu have “donned the nose”). Dinklage is certainly more comfortable in film too, and whatever else may be said about Joe Wright (and this was the guy who most recently directed the baffling disaster The Woman in the Window), he knows his way around a period piece, especially one like this that has certain shades of his best efforts there like Pride and Prejudice, Anna Karenina, and Atonement. Whatever keeps him away from contemporary movies the better.
Wright’s direction is actually pretty good here, especially where he’s required to give the film a healthy dose of pomp and aesthetic flare. He keeps his world of Paris fairly small and contained, to better match the nature of the atmosphere in both the original story and its’ stage variation. He keeps the characters in good focus and though his musical sequences are far from extraordinary in design and expression (they can sometimes even be stagnant), they are dressed very nicely and composed in some lovely artful ways. It’s the style he hasn’t worked in in nearly a decade, and you can tell he’s happy to be back at it.
It’s also conveyed with such earnestness, the script as well, which feels kind of bold and endearing. The movie is unapologetically poetic, romantic, sentimental, without a trace of irony, cynicism or winking irreverence. In this, it not only retains the spirit of the original play but creates a context for its’ heightened melodrama to be taken at face value. There is something of a silliness to the famous scene where Christian is fed poetry by Cyrano to an enchanted Roxanne on a balcony -indeed the most famous balcony scene in romance fiction after that one from Shakespeare. It has been parodied numerous times, most people are probably aware of it in that context first. But Wright and Schmidt, alongside their actors, make it feel sincere and sweet again.
Which does bring about maybe the chief reason the movie works and that is Peter Dinklage, rightly being discussed now as a snub for Best Actor consideration. Dinklage embodies that sincerity with every fibre, the angst and tragedy of a man grappling with the misery of his low sense of worth -even more palpable than in the original tale as a visible ostracized minority. And yet it is but one side of his character, the charismatic, erudite, and extremely capable soldier coming through as his public persona with no less legitimate weight. Dinklage makes each line, each romantic statement or verse, the believable pining of his heart -it’s the best work he’s done since the early seasons of Game of Thrones. As the subject of his affections, Haley Bennett delivers well too with a character conventionally defined by just her beauty and love of poetry. And Kelvin Harrison Jr., who incidentally seems the most at home in a musical format, works well as the naive Christian, vessel of Cyrano’s poetry and as such the subject of Roxanne’s affection. Both these characters are allowed slightly more dimension than the original play gave them. Ben Mendelsohn’s De Guiche (Roxanne’s aristocrat fiancé) by contrast is not.
None of these performers have previously been in a musical, discounting Dinklage and Bennett’s work on the stage version. And the music in general is the odd thing about the film. For a story that as acknowledged fits beautifully the mold of a musical, as rendered here it doesn’t particularly feel necessary. The song sequences often take the form of soliloquies of characters expressing their feelings, and so are a bit scattered, with music not being so ingrained in the films’ DNA as even something like Tick, Tick…Boom! The songs themselves are mostly decent but not terribly memorable or elaborate -but for a couple they’re all solos and not largely staged or edited with much creativity. The exceptions are “Every Letter” in which Roxanne’s infatuation with the letters is illustrated with sharply strung orgasmic imagery, and the big climactic piece “Wherever I Fall”, the only number that feels made for an epic Broadway scale. As for the singers, they’re also just generally okay -Dinklage fares better than I thought, but he can’t quite compare to say the entire cast of West Side Story. That itself kind of hurts Cyrano -being from a year of so many great musicals performed by brilliant casts, this one where the musical elements are firmly mediocre, pretty clearly doesn’t match up.
Still, I don’t know that I’d prefer it without the songs, or at least what they serve to express tonally. Because Cyrano does benefit for going hard on that emotional intensity. In a way it is extremely loyal to the story and themes of Edmond Rostand’s original work, sacrificing very little for the modern machine -like a Shakespeare adaptation done traditionally. It is imperfect, just as Cyrano himself is. But it also rises to the occasion like Cyrano in the areas that matter. And Peter Dinklage has long deserved to be the actor to bring it there.
Support me on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/JordanBosch
Follow me on Twitter: https://twitter.com/Jordan_D_Bosch
Letterboxd: https://letterboxd.com/jbosch/
Comments
Post a Comment