Film review: Cyrano | The week Great Britain

Cyrano by Bergerac “Has been adapted for the films many times,” said Peter Bradshaw in The guard; Based on Erica Schmidt’s stage musical, this latest version stars Peter Dinklage as a soldier poet who is hopelessly in love with Roxanne (Haley Bennett).

In the 1897 play, Cyrano has an “unfunny phallic big nose”; here his “Schnoz” is normal height, but he is convinced that Roxanne will never love him because of his short stature. So when she falls in love with the handsome but dopey and “hopelessly speechless” Christian (Kelvin Harrison Jr.), Cyrano offers to ghostwrite Christian’s love letters in hopes of making her happy. The film is slow and solemn, but redeemed by Dinklage, who unleashes the full power of his “natural charisma”.

It’s good, but unfortunately the music isn’t, Wendy Ide said in The Observer. Composed by rock band The National, the songs are unforgettable and “virtually unmelodic”; and the script is little better: it revels in the “tragedy of history” while failing to convey Cyrano’s “parrying humor.” Without that “essential part of the character’s appeal,” it falls to the film’s “glorious setting” (which was shot in Sicily) to do much of the “heavy lifting.”

But the real problem with Joe Wright’s film is that the main characters “feel like complete strangers throughout,” even though the script tells us they can read each other’s hearts, Tim Robey said in The Daily Telegraph.

That’s partly because of their strangely different accents: Bennett speaks English, while Dinklage has retained his “American snarl.” But it’s also because Roxanne comes across as an authoritative snob. it’s poor Cyrano in which we feel like both men are wasted on her.