Peter Dinklage charges up new haunting, heart-rending ‘Cyrano’
JOE Wright gives Cyrano de Bergerac a timely, smartly conceived refresh with Cyrano, his adaptation of an adaptation of Edmond Rostand's 1897 play.
In 2019, writer Erica Schmidt staged a production starring her husband, Peter Dinklage, in the title role, adding music by Aaron and Bryce Dessner of the band the National.
In Wright's screen version of that show, the director evinces the same sensitivity he's brought to such films as Pride & Prejudice, Atonement and Anna Karenina, bringing a newfound sense of spontaneity and freedom to his distinctive jewel-box aesthetic.
Filmed in the picturesque Sicilian town of Noto during the height of the pandemic lockdown, Cyrano is unmistakably a period piece, transpiring in the 17th century during the Franco-spanish War.
But it's also infused with anachronistic touches that give it a jolt of offhand humour and fierce urgency.
As the film opens, a dewily radiant – but nearly penniless – beauty named Roxanne (Haley Bennett) prepares to attend the theatre with her oily and insistent suitor, the Duke De Guiche (Ben Mendelsohn).
Once ensconced, the play begins, only to be interrupted by Cyrano, who swoops in on a rope and proceeds to insult the lead actor, disrupt the audience and engage the foppish hanger-on Valvert (Joshua James) in a rap battle and duel.
The sequence of anticipation, wordplay and swordsmanship accelerates with balletic energy, with Wright's unintrusive camera always on the move to capture the action as well as smaller gestures.
It's here that Roxanne locks eyes with Christian (Kelvin Harrison Jr), and the two fall for each other in an instant.
Later, the handsome but inarticulate Christian will enlist the supposedly unhandsome but eloquent Cyrano to woo Roxanne from afar, in a plot of unrequited love, unspoken desire and ego-driven self-deceit that has lasted through the ages.
I say “supposedly unhandsome” because, although Dinklage's Cyrano might be deemed sexually stymied by his dwarfism, it's difficult to imagine anyone being immune to his smouldering appeal.
With his ember-like eyes, soulful face and core of bristling anger, Dinklage gives his character (whose fatal flaw in Rostand's play was an unattractively large nose) a charge of pure animal magnetism.
Bennett, as the bright but vain and manipulative Roxanne, plays her character with an air of suspicion that something might be sparking between them, even though their lifelong friendship has been purely platonic. (Then again, Roxanne's inability to get past Cyrano's “unique physique”, in the words of his friend Le Bret, eerily anticipates today's social media culture in which image is everything. 'Twas ever thus.)
What ensues is one of the great tragedies of romantic literature, a heartbreaking exercise in classic irony that serves as a commentary on appearance and reality, facade and authenticity, and human beings' enduring inability to get out of our own way.
Set against gorgeous real-life locations (including a dramatic wartime sequence filmed on Mount Etna), Wright's Cyrano is bathed in creamy pastels and increasingly stylised tones of grey and bone white, the soothing palette spiked with occasional shots of crimson, by way of the jackets worn by Cyrano, Christian and their fellow soldiers.
The stagecraft, seemingly as inspired by commedia dell'arte tumbles and pirouettes as by grittily naturalistic cinéma vérité, possesses a buoyant sense of spirit and movement.
When Wright comes in for the occasional close-up, it's to capture the pain, confusion and longing on his protagonists' alternately bemused and besotted faces.
Cyrano joins a crop of recent movies that have sought to revivify the musical form: Here, the effort is uneven, if ultimately deeply moving.
Although the Dessner brothers' songs, with lyrics by bandmate Matt Berninger and Carin Besser, are perfectly suited to Dinklage's mellow baritone, they begin to sound repetitive and on-the-nose over the film's twohour running time.
Bennett and Harrison are both lovely, lyrical singers, but oddly Cyrano's most shatteringly effective musical moment arrives by a trio of cameo players, when Glen Hansard, Sam Amidon and Scott Folan – playing soldiers about to go to battle – sing Wherever I Fall, an achingly beautiful anthem to love, grief and yearning.
That scene feels particularly affecting at a moment when the world apprehensively awaits another war. Cyrano, like the best art its implacable hero celebrates, is full of poetry, romance, terror and truth.
It feels beamed from a distant past, but also sprung fully formed from 21st-century anxieties.
Wright has given Rostand and Schmidt's twin visions his own signature: fleet, playful and unapologetically fanciful, but also tempered by surpassing sadness and loss.
The result is equal parts heart-rending and haunting.