Cyrano: Film Review
I’m usually excited for every musical but my feelings towards musical romance Cyrano were oddly muted. I wasn’t expecting much from it, to be honest, and I came away pleasantly surprised.
The movie musical, inspired by the famous play Cyrano de Bergerac, stars Peter Dinklage in the title role. Given his stature, Cyrano feels too self-conscious to tell his life-long friend Roxanne (Haley Bennett) that he’s been deeply in love with her for years. He complicates matters when he offers to write love letters to Roxanne from Christian (Kelvin Harrison Jr.), a soldier she desires. Being no wordsmith, Christian accepts the offer and allows the romantic poet Cyrano to woo Roxanne on his behalf.
This feels like the role Dinklage was born to play. Traditionally, in previous adaptations of the play, Cyrano is deemed “ugly” because he has a massive nose and handsome actors portray him with a fake nose and that’s it. Dinklage brings so much more to the character because he deeply understands that feeling of self-consciousness because of his appearance, having a form of dwarfism. It makes the character’s story far more realistic and emotional and it’s fantastic seeing Dinklage as the lead in a romantic drama. His singing voice is decent and his performance is very good – you can feel that the weight of unrequited love bears down on him.
Bennett is captivating onscreen and I found her performance very entertaining, and her singing voice is impressive. Harrison Jr. has a gorgeous voice (to match his looks!) and his encounters with Roxanne provided some much-needed comedic moments, of which there are few. I also enjoyed Monica Dolan as Roxanne’s lady Marie, while Ben Mendelsohn is good fun as the panto-esque villain De Guiche. He gets a great villain song too.
Speaking of the musical numbers, don’t go in expecting big, catchy showstoppers – it’s not that kind of movie. The songs are written by Aaron and Bryce Dessner and Matt Berninger of The National so that should give you some indication of what they sound like. The numbers are mostly comprised of the actors singing their feelings with some stylised movements and occasionally some choreography from background dancers. They are designed to push the story forward, not to get people singing along and tapping their feet. Not that kind of musical!
I assumed Cyrano, directed by Joe Wright, wouldn’t be my thing but I liked it more than I expected. The leads made the film very engaging and more entertaining than the trailer led me to believe. The costume and production design are gorgeous and there is some wonderful cinematography from Seamus McGarvey. I’ve never seen an adaptation of Cyrano before so I didn’t know how the story ended and yet I still didn’t really care about the outcome of the narrative. I liked it but I wasn’t super into it.
In cinemas Friday 25th February