Joe Wright (2021)

The latest film version of Edmond Rostand’s Cyrano de Bergerac might be described as a tale of two couples.  The main actor is married to the screenwriter, the main actress to the director.  Cyrano is also a doubly different take on Rostand’s durable original – a musical whose eponymous hero isn’t long of nose but short in stature.  Both these distinctive qualities are problematic.  One is a simpler problem than the other.

The simpler problem is the music, by Aaron and Bryce Dressner (best known, at least in America, as members of rock band The National).  At first, Joe Wright’s performers break into song only occasionally and briefly:  it’s as if they’re under a misapprehension that this is a musical and Wright has to keep intervening to tell them otherwise.  These aberrations don’t last long enough to qualify as musical numbers in the usual sense.  By halfway through Cyrano‘s two hours, though, the Dressners’ compositions dominate, incontinently.  Yet they still rarely amount to songs – as distinct from a couple of musical phrases repeated for much longer than they were at the start.  It doesn’t help that Wright tends to give these sequences the look of pop videos (the world in which he started his directing career).  It is fortunate that the film’s bits of dancing are relatively few.  In a routine featuring the Gascon Cadets, ahead of their departure to fight in France’s 1640s war with Spain, the prancing soldiers just look to be getting in each other’s way.

Cyrano started life as a stage musical, written and directed by Erica Schmidt, with her husband Peter Dinklage in the lead.  For part of its Off Broadway run in 2018, Haley Bennett played Roxanne and she now reprises the role in her husband’s picture.  Bennett is likeable and sings pleasantly but she’s less than dazzling and at times almost stolid.  Despite their mutual infatuation, there’s no spark at all between her Roxanne and Kelvin Harrison Jr’s Christian, the supposedly dashing, tongue-tied young soldier whose romantic script the unseen Cyrano supplies.  As the Duc de Guiche, a preening suitor whom Roxanne is determined not to marry, an OTT Ben Mendelsohn does well to be hard to recognise under his period wig and plenty of face make-up.  The supporting cast includes several more than capable British character actors:  Mark Benton as the ham actor Montfleury; Monica Dolan as Marie, Roxanne’s chaperone; Peter Wight as the baker Ragueneau; Ruth Sheen as a mother superior (I jest not).  But this film is all about Peter Dinklage.  He is the undoubted star of the show, arrhythmic as it is, and also the more complex problem of Cyrano.

Audiences for previous versions of Cyrano de Bergerac have always known that the actor playing the protagonist could remove his enormous hooter.  This time around, we’re well aware that he really is only four-and-a-half feet tall.  In theory, that reality could be salutary, could make Cyrano’s tragedy more involving than ever before.  In practice, it’s fraught with difficulty – and not just because it prompts us to wonder how come this diminutive Cyrano is, as well as the possessor of a rapier wit, a famously effective swordsman.  Actors are meant to draw on themselves in building characters but it can be uncomfortable if they seem to be themselves.  It’s hard to watch Dinklage here without wondering if his piercingly sad eyes aren’t expressing his own frustrations – as someone whose physical characteristics have limited, and continue to limit, the range of roles available to him.  Isn’t this always liable to be the case (at least until the dawn of height-blind casting)?   Not to this extent, I think.  Dinklage’s character’s achondroplasia was essential to Tom McCarthy’s The Station Agent (2003) but all the principals in that film had their different reasons for melancholy, which drew them together, eventually leaving them in a better place.  Having never seen an episode of Game of Thrones, I can’t comment on Dinklage’s most famous, multi-Emmy-winning creation, Tyrion Lannister, although it seems clear enough from the Wikipedia synopsis that there’s more to this character than meets the eye.  That’s why, in Cyrano, I enjoyed Dinklage’s moments of dry wit – and there are plenty – but felt uncomfortable when he underlined Cyrano’s anguish, which felt surplus to requirements.

In 1951, José Ferrer won the Academy Award for playing Cyrano de Bergerac; by coincidence, his next famous role was as Henri Toulouse-Lautrec in John Huston’s Moulin Rouge (1952), in which Ferrer designed and wore knee-pads that allowed him to walk on his knees to simulate Toulouse-Lautrec’s lack of height.  (Huston also made use of body doubles, platforms, concealed pits and a variety of ingenious camera angles to complete the effect.)   Only twenty years after Baz Luhrmann’s Moulin Rouge!, it’s presumably too soon for yet another version.  This may be no bad thing since there’s no contest as to who would be the lead in a remake now.  Peter Dinklage is very well equipped to make an audience feel more than sorry for the character he’s playing.  It would be a waste of his acting gifts for him to devote the rest of his career to portraying those whose dwarfism is not just an essential and challenging part of their identity but the insuperable tragedy of their existence.

24 February 2022