Review: Joe Wright’s Cyrano Doesn’t Fully Honor the Piercing Sadness of the Play

Adapted by Erica Schmidt from her own 2018 stage production, Joe Wright’s Cyrano reimagines Edmond Rostand’s Cyrano de Bergerac as a musical with music and lyrics by members of the National, and with Peter Dinklage’s diminutive stature substituting for Cryano’s oversized nose. On top of that, we also get Wright’s usual formal grandstanding: elaborate tracking shots, refracted imagery, and storybook castles, mountains, and battlefields. As is typically the case with his films, one is left both exhilarated and exhausted, wishing that he had been more interest in the material at the center of his house of flourishes.

Dinklage’s casting as Cyrano, the swordsman, poet, and French guardsman of Rostand’s play who’s crippled by self-doubt, is the film’s most effective idea, as the actor specializes in brash, confident men facing crises of identity. And, as expected, Dinklage does full service to Cyrano’s erudite braggadocio, particularly in the famous scene in which the aesthete humiliates a bad actor, leading to a duel with one of the man’s defenders. Cyrano’s pridefulness is clearly what stimulates Wright most as a filmmaker, as it syncs up with his grandiose aesthetics. The pathos of Cyrano’s loneliness, however, doesn’t take full hold until late in the film.

Cyrano’s most immediate disappointment is the relationship established between Cyrano and Christian (Kelvin Harrison Jr.), an attractive new guardsman serving under De Guiche (Ben Mendelsohn), who’s drawn the attention of Cyrano’s lifelong secret love, Roxanne (Haley Bennett). The contention, and eventual friendship, between Cyrano and Christian is usually one of the Cyrano de Bergerac narrative’s great pleasures, especially the early moment in which naïve, foolhardy Christian attempts a battle of wills with the assured Cyrano. This scene, however, is truncated virtually to nonexistence in Wright’s film, as the filmmaker characteristically favors swooning yet impersonal set pieces with fencers and dancers.

Cyrano and Christian become compatriots almost instantly, as the former’s initial egotism has been sanded down, rendering him a blandly accommodating fellow. Astonishingly, Wright also glosses over the crux of the entire story: Cyrano agreeing to write Christian’s love letters to Roxanne, fusing his intelligence with Christian’s appearance. This farcical setup, freighted with the doubt and self-loathing that hounds so many of us, has been mostly condensed into one of the National’s songs. And those songs are mostly forgettable, suggesting commonplace dialogue set to Bryce and Aaron Bessner’s obsessive music. They’re certainly a poor substitute for Cyrano’s poetry and grandstanding, though one, sung by several soldiers as they face certain death at the Siege of Arras, has the cryptic poetry of the National’s studio albums.

In fact, it’s at this point, with war and death seeping into its romantic framework, that Cyrano truly starts to come to life. Certain lines really hit their marks, such as Cyrano’s proclamation that he might lose everything if he loses the pain of Roxanne’s (in his mind) unattainability. Wright slows the hurly-burly of his staging down and homes in on Cyrano and his love as they face the fallout of their lives a few years after the adventure with Christian.

Many mainstream versions of Cyrano de Bergerac—including one of the best, Fred Schepisi’s Roxanne, starring Steve Martin and Daryl Hannah—soften the play’s ending, though Wright and Schmidt honor its piercing sadness. Ailing, aging, taking periodic refuge in a church, Cyrano finally reveals his secret to Roxanne, who of course on some level always knew of his affection for her. For once, the set design here acutely reflects the characters’ emotions, as the beautiful church suggests that Cyrano, finally feeling love directly, is already in heaven.

Yet this church also mocks him, promising death just as the entire drive of his life has been realized. The weight in Dinklage’s face is unforgettable, as is the torment in Bennett’s as Roxanne recognizes her own foolishness. This is the essence of Cyrano de Bergerac, and the film, without too many frills, cuts straight to the universal fears and longings that the play illuminates. Pity that Wright, like his heroes, took so long to see what was truly important.