And so here’s a movie based upon another classic play, but one which I’ve never even heard anything about. Sure, I’ve seen the comically long nose before, I know Steve Martin’s Roxanne is a thing, but I’ve never heard of Cyrano de Bergerac, or the original story of the man who lurks in the shadows and plays matchmaker for his friend. I came across a video a couple weeks ago detailing how this movie will change Cyrano’s unusual facial peculiarity for dwarfism, with Peter Dinklage assuming the role – what a ballsy but fantastic idea, to change the more comical and sensational imperfection to something very real, where I assume we will gain a lesson that will provide a further sense of dignity to the community of little people. Peter Dinklage was recognised with a Golden Globe nomination for great work in Cyrano, and I’m really looking forward to seeing how this movie goes about it, and how this famous story is even told.
Cyrano is a renowned poet, a guard in the French army, and a life-long friend of fanciful Roxane (Haley Bennett), whom he loves very secretly, and very deeply. Roxane must soon choose a person to marry – she has the wise choice of De Guiche (Ben Mendelsohn) in her favour, but Roxane yearns to hold out for true love, where she can proudly admire her selection passionately. At the theatre, Roxane believes she has experienced love at first sight, when she meets the gaze of a handsome young cadet, Christian (Kelvin Harrison Jr.), in the crowd. Roxane cannot tell Cyrano quickly enough, and urges him to facilitate a meeting, and protect her new love at his post. Believing his physical stature not worthy of a beauty like Roxane, Cyrano transfers his poetic prose to Christian, guiding him in the written word, and titillating Roxane in a manner that Christian could never truly manage alone. The plan works well, too well, and Cyrano and Christian must live in their ruse, all while De Guiche lurks like a big bad wolf, unhappy that his affections for Roxane are going unmet.
Well from the poster’s tagline, ‘have you ever loved someone?’, you can surmise that this might be a weeper. And the premise in parts sounds a lot like Disney’s The Hunchback of Notre Dame, an animated classic that I’ve always gravitated towards; both set in France too. Coming off Death on the Nile myself, which saw forlorn love as a negative, Cyrano holds that aching desire a little more sympathetically. Early on, I thought this movie had a lot going on, and I was loving the liveliness this movie musters with a fine attention to detail and tone; I loved the random crowd members taking their part in the opening song, singing solo lines here and there, and indicating that these yearnings for love are universal – well, if not universal, then very common. While the head baker expresses his love with Cyrano’s aid, the baker’s crew incorporate baking into sensual dancing, and it’s all uniquely in-tune. But very soon, I began to find my problems with Cyrano, that I wish were not there. Smally, I wish there was a few more lines given to the backstories of these characters – Cyrano and Roxane grew up in a village; how did they come to be in the city? If Roxane was born an orphan, how does she appear to be relatively wealthy? Where has Christian come from? How has Cyrano’s dwarfism ever oppressed him in any way other than in jest and in his own heart?
And, I came to decide that this movie’s songs are very stupid, apparently added into this original play in a 2018 stage adaptation, written by this movie’s screenwriter, Erica Schmidt. It’s not all of them though, for the song outside Roxane’s balcony is very intense, and the song amongst the soldiers in the snow breaks up the scenes of bleak war. But there’s just so many songs, and for every moment like where our three main characters are professing what the letters mean to them, there is a shot of Roxane longingly sauntering through a curtain, that is just cringy-lame. Obviously, the songs are there to communicate the inner thoughts of our players, but the problem is that I don’t think they match the ‘panache’ of our script’s written word, and by taking them out, I wonder if more thought could have been given to the machinations of our characters and the story. Cyrano is also not the prettiest of movies, which is absurd, when there is rich sandstone and olden-time lived-in architecture to exploit, but our settings simply lack character. I could assume it’s production was ‘resourceful’, and that’s not something to be knocked if true, but director Joe Wright is no slouch, and his films I’ve seen (Atonement, Darkest Hour, The Woman in the Window) have never had a problem capturing setting.
The best scenes of the movie are easily the scenes between Roxane and Cyrano. I would describe their dialogue and chemistry as spunky; Haley Bennett is building a nicely versatile career without much recognition; withdrawn in Swallow, secretively sharp in The Girl on the Train, and passionately daft here. Peter Dinklage’s Cyrano is quite a physical role, swashbuckling through a one-shot against ten men in one place, but he looks at home after years of experience on Game of Thrones. And that’s another thing; Dinklage has earned so much respect for Game of Thrones that it would be preposterous to see him as ugly, or socially stigmatic. Through the first half of the movie, I did think a person with a comically large schnoz would be more believably burdened. But I suppose the nose or lack of height are just stand-ins for any self-perceived personal imperfection that might stop a person professing their love, and I came to understand Cyrano best as just any best friend frightened to jeopardise a friendship by attempting to get out of the friend-zone. But I’m also not sure why Cyrano has an American accent; he’s the only character to have one, in a French story where everyone else sounds British. We know Dinklage can do a very good British accent, again from Game of Thrones, and I can only assume the choice was made to separate the two characters, but it feels so out of place! Ben Mendelson is also pretty great, although his part isn’t huge.
Then there’s the character of Christian… this guy, is a blockhead! He’s shameless. After the song on the balcony where Cyrano has clearly added in his own details that show his affections for Roxane, and has done all the work, Roxane wants a kiss, and Christian is merrily off to smash. Then when Christian does clue-in that Cyrano is in love with Roxane himself, Christian runs off in a strop, right into no man’s land, like he forgets there’s a war on, and subsequently gets shot… I wouldn’t have believed it if I hadn’t seen it all with my own face 🤣 Is Christian much different from Family Guy‘s Peter Griffin chasing a ball into traffic? Nope! He isn’t. No wonder Steve Martin’s iteration of this story is a comedy, because if this character alone, is always supposed to be so dense, then it’s laughable. Constructively, I would have expected this character to work so easily as a courageous everyman. Looking back at Disney’s The Hunchback of Notre Dame again, Phoebus’ temperament is perfect; Christian is a half-wit.
But yet, despite all these flaws, I don’t mind this movie. I felt like I was discovering a delightful fable while watching Cyrano, one that is understandably revered and copied commonly in other media. At its core, it’s about expressing love in lieu of pride, and letting yourself embrace life despite your hang-ups, before it can pass you buy, or you end up writing cheques your heart can’t cash – ‘writing poems your heart can’t cash’ just didn’t sound right. Roxane has got the hots for the written word like no other, and I have always heard that the way to a woman’s heart is to stimulate her imagination – look no further than Cyrano for a primal example of that. At the beginning, I did fathom whether it’s believable that a woman these days would not know that their male friends may be in love with them, and if a man would dedicate himself into a hole when a woman’s head is elsewhere – I think it’s called ‘simping’ nowadays. I mean, I went through it when I was ten. Aaannd, probably continually afterwards until I was 25, so I guess this 120-year-old story still holds up. When I was ten, I gave Atta and Flik A Bug’s Life stickers to the boyfriend of a girl I liked so he could give them to her, from him – call me ‘Cyrano’, if I wasn’t so tall. But that’s immature now, and as a culture, I feel like we don’t celebrate love in music or movies a quarter as much as we used to, and so when these earnest movies come around, I love to see them done well. And, the bottom-line is, you just have to tell people when you love them; you just have to, or not let yourself spiral into overreaching favours like Cyrano. From West Side Story to Cyrano, balconies are back in a big way, and I’m glad I saw Cyrano.
3.0
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