Just when you suppose you’ve seen it all, Joe Wright — one of the last true madcaps in Hollywood cinema — rebounds from the idiocy of his independent movie “ Woman in the Window” with a full-throated musical adaption of “ Cyrano de Bergerac” soundtracked by The National, shot during COVID on Sicily (with hundreds of lavishly costumed extras singing a mope gemstone worst on the snowy peak of an active flashpoint!), and starring Peter Dinklage as a lovelorn minstrel who possesses the courage to brand- fight 10 men at a time but not the pride to confess his passions to the one woman he’s loved for all eternity.
Perhaps it’s just the zany makeup and corsets talking, but there are moments during Wright’s “ Cyrano” — similar as the nonfictional rap independent movie battle during which Cyrano trades rhymes with a foe while they guard to the death — that delude you into allowing this must be the most gonzo work of mainstream art that someone has made in defiance of a pest since “ The Decameron.” Is it good? In corridor! Is it intoxicated with the same demented bravado that its namesake embodies when he sneaks behind the adversary lines of the Franco-Spanish War, but tragically lacks whenever he’s alone with his true love Roxanne (a ravishing Haley Bennett, with whom Wright himself is besotted in real life)? Absolutely. And that’s plenitude to sing about.
For all of the insanity that Wright spirits into this independent movie design, still, the credit for its most unanticipated ideas belongs to playwright and screenwriter Erica Schmidt, who first brought this musical interpretation of “ Cyrano” to life on stage in 2018. Wright surely honored the genius of Dinklage’s casting in that product; not only does the actor’s singing voice echo the hand baritone of The National frontman Matt Berringer, but his “ unique constitution” lends Cyrano a far more poignant reason for his instability than the character’s traditional, cartoon conk. But indeed so, I suspect that what really lit a fire under Wright’s burro wasn’t just the source material, but also the chance to acclimatize it under the most psychotic of independent movie circumstances.
A shoot-the-moon hairstylist who isn’t hysterical to work without a safety net ( indeed if that means winding up in director ICU, right coming to director jail, after every alternate movie he makes), Wright is someone who’s always been creatively inspired by a bind. In addition to directing several flicks about people who discover their true eventuality with their tails against the wall (e.g. “ Hanna,” “ The Darkest Hour”), Wright’s finest trouble — a brightly intricate “ Anna Karenina” that deprived the Russian novel into a snow- globe — was-conceived from the ground up to lower than two months before the first day of firing because the independent movie had a radical new vision of what it should be. Wright sympathizes with Cyrano’s boldness and bluster, and wants so poorly for this tableware-tongued love fool to threat falling on his face; he knows that the prices can be worth it.
His “ Cyrano” doesn’t waste any time swinging for the walls, as it begins with Roxanne launching into the first of the film’s numerous semi-conversational songs while ensconced in one of Massimo Cantini Parrini’s wonderfully melodramatic costumes. It’s an accurate exercise of what’s to come, Lush, light on its bases, and more eccentric than it’s involving. Bennett makes for an indefectible Roxanne, percolating a flush-cheeked warmth that’s fringed with just a hint of vanity; she may be framed as an innocent in the love rhombus that forms as this independent movie and story take shape, but the value she places on aesthetics is at the center of this whole mess.
Roxanne is kept by the rich and repulsive De Guiche (Ben Mendelsohn, great despite his egregious capability to do this kind of villain part in his sleep), a typical situation for beauty of her time. As her maid cracks “ Children need love, grown-ups plutocrat.” Alas, the moment that Roxanne locks eyes with a handsome dogface across a crowded room (Kelvin Harrison Jr. as the mutually infatuated Christian), she feels her needs being rearranged in a hurry. What an unfortunate turn of events for our poor Cyrano, who’s sustained for Roxanne since they were youthful, but always assumed that someone so fair would no way “ settle” for a man of elevation. Several independent movie characters rebuke Cyrano for allowing so little of his crush, but the way Roxanne swoons for the first strapping hunk to walk through the door makes it easy to understand our idol’s enterprises.
As those of us who regularly watch the Uma Thurman/ Janeane Garofolo classic “ The Truth About Pussycats and Tykes” on a string will be suitable to prognosticate, Cyrano soon hatches a plan to express his feelings without risking implicit rejection He’ll write letters to Roxanne under Christian’s identity, and enjoy their preceding love secondhand. “ I’ll make you eloquent,” he says to the lingo-tied dogface, “ while you’ll make me handsome.” Of course, effects snappily grow more complicated from there, erecting to the stage world’s second-most notorious deck scene before moving into an important darker home in a way that will surprise people who substantially know this independent movie story via the Steve Martin vehicle “ Roxanne” or any of the innumerous sitcoms that have espoused its utmost iconic beats.
But this “ Cyrano” is each about air, or warrant thereof (as is frequently the case). Co-written by Berringer and his woman Carin Besser, the unfussy lyrics add some easy tang to the kind of epistolary love that’s frequently so enervating to watch on- screen, as Cyrano and the rest of the cast belt out their passions — nearly simply to themselves, and not to each independent movie other. With many choruses and indeed smaller hooks, the utmost of the musical figures sounds like the ramblings of a racing mind, leaving the film’s army of hop to supply too important of the independent movie swoon and spectacle.
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All the same, that spectacle frequently proves swoon-good, with highlight sequences including the Broadway- featured “ I want” song that Christian and the rest of his garrison perform on a Sicilian gemstone stronghold (one of the film’s numerous astonishing locales), and the independent movie part where Mendelsohn storms into the city on a pall of Andrew Lloyd Webber-Esque rubbish guitar. Utmost of the ballads sound more like half-finished The National demonstrations; Dinklage, Harrison, Bennett, and the rest can carry a tune and also some, but only a gem appearance by vocalizers Glen Hansard, Sam Amidon, and Scott Folan compel the movie to serve up a meatier independent movie song. It’s an outlier in a movie that swirls together too numerous strong constituents for any one of them to leave much of a taste.
Any one of them except for Peter Dinklage. The actor has no way nestled down from places that depend on his size — in large part, one imagines, because he’s only been offered so numerous druthers — but his Cyrano allows him to defy the precariousness that comes with any physical difference more candidly than ever ahead. “ Cyrano de Bergerac” is nothing if not a tragedy about a proud man lowered by tone- mistrustfulness, Dinklage’s implosive performance is so poignant for how Cyrano struggles to escape the atonality of his own studies.
“ My heart’s not indeed angry, that’s just the way that it breaks” he raps in that independent movie “ Hamilton”-ready dogfight at the launch of the movie, and while utmost of the preceding drama is stifled by Wright’s madman staging (which demands all of our attention) and the loose-befitting fustiness that it wears, the profusion of Cyrano’s tone- fulfilling vaticinator always manages to cut through the noise.
