Cyrano, review: a stiff, underwhelming take on a classic love story
Joe Wright’s Cyrano announces itself in every way as A Joe Wright Film, right from the decorous opening shot of two dangling marionettes, which were built by the filmmaker’s father in 1948. It certainly feels logical that Wright, the child of puppeteers, might be drawn sooner or later to Cyrano de Bergerac, the ultimate tale of romantic ventriloquism, in which one smitten suitor supplies the words to his beloved Roxanne, and another, the lips.
That the film winds up cramped, underwhelming and strangely thwarted is hard to square with all the effort up on screen – or perhaps it just feels too much like effort. Wright has taken Erica Schmidt’s 2018 stage musical, with songs by The National, and hoisted it up as a quasi-film-musical on a modest $30m budget, which was resourcefully shot during the pandemic on location in Noto, Sicily.
The town’s gilded, late-baroque extravagance makes it a plum backdrop for all this director’s busy-bee technique. It’s hardly his fault that it often seems weirdly deserted: it had to be.
The real problem is three main characters who continue to feel like total strangers, even when the script and songs are trying to convince us they’ve seen deeply into one another’s hearts. The warrior-poet Cyrano (Peter Dinklage, without the customary huge nose other actors have donned for the part) and Roxanne (Haley Bennett) grew up together, we’re told, yet sound like they’ve never met – Bennett has plumped for an English accent, Dinklage kept his American growl. From minute one, they’re in different movies.
So it ever was with unrequited love? Hmmm. You can try to furnish this excuse, but Wright simply never gets a handle on a central relationship that ought to be tenderly awkward, not this stiff or remote.
When Christian (ardent Kelvin Harrison, Jr), a handsome soldier, claps eyes on Roxanne for the first time, they both melt with longing. But this courtship, obviously, is a disaster: Christian doesn’t have a poet’s soul. Only through love letters in his name is Roxanne inwardly ravished, but these are secretly written by Cyrano, in heartsick agony. When Christian tries speaking to her in person, she barely recognises the oaf.
It’s a poor Cyrano in which we feel the title character – in fact, both men – are wasted on Roxanne. Stuck with a mismanaged role, Bennett sings quite sweetly, but mainly about her character’s snobbish high standards: a key solo is called “I Need More”, and she cruelly shrugs off Christian’s fumbling “I love you”s as trite nothings, when his inarticulate earnestness is, if anything, his most endearing quality.
All of this makes Cyrano look a fool to place this disdainful, self-impressed muse on the pedestal he does: TOO much of a fool, pushing matters out of Dinklage’s control, for all his charisma and evident commitment. His sturdy baritone is a terrific mixture of Matt Berninger’s and Nick Cave’s. What lets him down is everyone, especially Wright, overvaluing the power of words here – it might have been a more modern spin to recognise, instead, the impotence of so much empty phrase-making.
The story idles through the middle, then Cyrano and Christian are vengefully dispatched by Roxanne’s other suitor, Ben Mendelsohn’s powdered, bad panto villain De Guiche, to the freezing battlefront. It’s here, in a cave late on, that the film at last comes alive, both emotionally and musically. That’s Glen Hansard, the Oscar-winning troubadour from Once, as one of a trio of doomed soldiers singing “Wherever I Fall”, on the eve of their presumed demise.
This stirring far-from-home dirge is a clear standout among the songs, but Wright takes a fateful risk in giving it such pride of place. When he can pluck our heartstrings so ably with three minor characters who get about a minute apiece, it only makes the tragic love triangle he’s failed to animate look all the more trifling.
12A cert, 123 min. In cinemas from Feb 25
