Cyrano Review

Edmond Rostand’s Cyrano de Bergerac is one of the most recognisable French literacy tales. It has been adapted numerous times, including the acclaimed film from 1950, and the 1987 comedic modernisation Roxanne. The musical adaptation is the latest interpretation of the story.

Cyrano de Bergerac (Peter Dinklage) is a soldier, a skilled swordsman, and a poet who’s underestimated because of his short stature. He’s in love with his oldest friend, Roxanne (Haley Bennett), but she’s unaware of this. She has fallen for Christian de Neuvillette (Kelvin Harrison Jr.) and Cyrano ends up forming an unholy alliance with the young man. Cyrano will write letters for Christian which would result in Christian becoming articulate and Cyrano being handsome.

2021 was a big year for musicals because films like In the Heights, Encanto, Tick, Tick… BOOM! and Steven Spielberg’s remake of West Side Story. All these films were received and loved by audiences, so Cyrano was facing tough competition. The film has achieved a 86% rating on Rotten Tomatoes and earned numerous nominations, including at the Golden Globes and BAFTAs. However, this only tells half the story.

Cyrano was directed by Joe Wright, a filmmaker I like a lot. He has made films like Atonement, Hanna, Anna Karenina, and Darkest Hour, and his films often have excellent performances and complex tracking movements and continuous shots. One of the highlights from his career was the Dunkirk sequence in Atonement which was a great showcase of technical prowess and emotional storytelling. So, he seemed like a great candidate to make a musical. But as a musical, Cyrano was disappointing.

The main reason why Cyrano was a disappointment was a simple one: the songs weren’t memorable. In musicals people burst out into song because that’s the only way to express their emotions. The songs in this were underwhelming because they were mostly soft and slow when many recent musical films have been grand and bombastic. Les Misérables, The Greatest Showman, and In the Heights had songs that were filled with love, joy, pain, and sorrow. The low energy in the songs was reflected in the staging and dancing. It was slow and methodical which stood in contrast to films like In the Heights and West Side Story (2021) which had kinetic song and dance numbers.

The best songs in the film were Cyrano’s introductory song, De Guiche’s (Ben Mendelsohn) villain’s song, and an ensemble sung by members of the guards. The Cyrano song was almost like a rap as he sang about his origins whilst the De Guiche song was a rock-influenced song as he prepares to have his wicked way with Roxanne. However, even this praise comes with a caveat because it showed there was a musical inconsistency. The guards’ song had the most emotional resonates because it was about soldiers writing to their loved ones before going into battle.

An area where Cyrano does improve on was its acting. Dinklage and Bennett reprised their roles from the stage show. Dinklage is an acting force and his role brought back memories of his role as Tyrion Lannister in Game of Thrones. Like Tyrion, Cyrano was a smart, witty man who can decimate someone with his words. Cyrano had a great introduction where he taunts an actor during the middle of a performance and got to show off his sword-fighting skills. Although Cyrano had this confidence, he’s unable to tell Roxanne he loves her because he believes she will never love a dwarf despite the fact they were friends since childhood.

Bennett’s Roxanne had a lot of cheek and spunk. This was shown in the first scenes of the film where she had a back-and-forth with her attendant, Marie (Monica Dolan). Roxanne was a confident and independent woman who did not want to be confined by the expectations of her gender. However, she was shallow because she used De Guiche to go to the theatre and she kept him on the hook, and her love for Christian was simply based on attraction.

Mendolsohn has made a career for himself as a rent-a-villain. He was the main antagonist in films like Ready Player One, Robin Hood (2018), and Spies in Disguises. In Cyrano he does play a different type of villain because he was a foppish aristocrat and there he had a moment of humanity because he was given an impossible choice by the king. Yet he still wanted to consummate the relationship with Roxanne, whether she liked it or not.

Being a Joe Wright film Cyrano was a lavish production. The film was mostly shot in Sicily, so it got to show off some picturesque towns, and buildings and there were some wonderful costumes. Wright also showed that he was still capable of crafting a scene. His famous tracking show was used when Cyrano had to fight ten men and it was a fine swashbuckling sequence. The theatre scene had a sense of class and grandeur and whilst the war scenes were brief it showed the hardships the soldiers had to endure.

Cyrano was a frustrating film. It looked great and Dinklage shows why he’s such a great actor. But it was a disjointed film because of its characterisation, and it was a lacklustre musical.