This week at Lincoln Center, I attended an advance screening of the musical drama “Cyrano”, starring Peter Dinklage.
Synopsis
When Cyrano learns that his beloved Roxanne is in love with another man, he starts writing her love letters that seem to come from the other man -- but will Cyrano ever be able to express his own love to her?
Story
Cyrano (Dinklage) is well-known in his town for being
intelligent, witty and articulate. He is
also known for being a midget. As a
guard for royalty, he’s got tremendous skills of swordsmanship and only the
foolish or reckless would dare challenge him.
But as stalwart as he may be, he does have one weakness: her name is Roxanne (Haley Bennett), a
beautiful young woman he’s known for many years. So awestruck is he by her beauty that he
cannot bring himself to admit his true love for her for fear that she would
reject him because he’s so short. This
does not stop others from pursuing Roxanne – one of which being a Duke, whom
she finds repulsive.
Roxanne, as it turns out, has her sights set for someone
else: a young man by the name of
Christian (Kelvin Harrison Jr.).
Christian is neither as wealthy as the Duke nor as erudite as Cyrano,
but he does have one advantage over both men:
he’s quite handsome. One night,
Roxanne set eyes on Christian and it was love at first sight. From that moment on, they both knew they had
to have each other. Yet it would seem
unlikely, especially since the much older Duke could rescue Roxanne from
poverty. Regardless of whether she wound
up with the Duke or with Christian, Cyrano would be heartbroken.
When Roxanne asks her good friend Cyrano to act as an
intermediary for setting up a proper introduction with Christian, he is of
course distraught because he thought Roxanne would be confessing her affection
towards him. Nevertheless, because he
loves Roxanne and wants her to be happy, he agrees to set up a meeting with
Christian. Once Christian explains his
reluctance due to his humble education, Cyrano offers to write letters to
Roxanne on his behalf. Upon receiving
these missives, she truly believes that it is Christian who has authored them. If Christian and Roxanne do in fact fall in
love with each other, will Roxanne ever learn that it was really Cyrano who
composed each billet doux ?
One of the sure-fire ways to ruin a film adaptation of a
classic story is to indiscriminately add music to it – and that’s precisely
where this version of “Cyrano” goes irrevocably wrong. Apparently, this is based on a musical stage
production, which itself was probably ill-conceived. Here, instead of Cyrano’s self-image
suffering from an overly endowed proboscis, his “shortcoming” is the fact that
he is vertically challenged. In this
re-imagined version, there is a certain degree of wokeness that cannot be
ignored; for example, the original story takes place in the 1600’s and there
are people of different races in key roles and there is no mention of
this. With this updated version, the
casting is somewhat “Hamiltonesque”.
It is highly unlikely that you will waltz out of the theater
singing any of these little ditties, regardless of how many times they may get
repeated (out of spite, one might assume).
Also, if you’re able to suspend your disbelief into thinking that this
Cyrano is quite the swashbuckler, then bless your guileless little heart. Speaking of suspending one’s disbelief, are
we really to understand that the Roxanne that is portrayed here is desirable enough
to be the object of desire by three men simultaneously? If so, is this town suffering a dearth of
attractive women? This is utterly
ponderous.
The information on this film states that it will be released in mid-January. This is rather telling, given that this early-winter/post-holiday timeframe is typically reserved for lesser releases – in other words, it’s the season of garbage dumps, or movies that the distributor doesn’t believe will be terribly well-received. After all, if they thought it would attract a sizable audience, they would be releasing it during the holiday season. It is usually these end-of-year releases that are done for either of two reasons: it’ll garner “boffo B.O.”, as they used to say, or it is likely that the picture will be worthy of one or many award nominations. Neither will be the case with this “Cyrano”.
