122 min | PG-13 | February 25, 2022 | United Artists Releasing
A man with the soul of a poet and a body the world mocks loves a woman he cannot bring himself to claim. So he writes another man’s love letters and watches her fall for his words wearing someone else’s face. The oldest cruelty in romance is loving in secret and calling it nobility.
Cyrano de Bergerac is the wittiest man in Paris and the most articulate. He loves Roxanne. He believes she could never love him back, so he pours his words into the mouth of a handsome soldier who has the face but not the language. Joe Wright stages the old Edmond Rostand story as a musical and strips the famous nose, locating Cyrano’s shame in his body instead. The film is about a man who would rather author a romance than risk being seen in one.
Peter Dinklage plays Cyrano with a controlled bitterness that cracks open in the love scenes. He delivers the verbal duels with relish and then collapses into something raw when he writes the letters he can never sign. Haley Bennett plays Roxanne as a woman in love with sentences, which makes her blindness believable rather than foolish. Kelvin Harrison Jr. gives Christian a sweet, panicked decency, a man who knows the words are not his and cannot stop using them. Ben Mendelsohn plays De Guiche as a predator in fine clothing, all velvet menace.
Wright directs from Erica Schmidt’s adaptation of her own stage musical. The songs come from the National, and they trade Rostand’s verbal fireworks for a hushed, melancholy register that flattens the comedy. The film’s strongest sequence sends Christian’s letters to soldiers at the front, and Wright cuts between the trenches and the writing of the words until the love story becomes an elegy. The production design favors painted Sicilian light and candlelit interiors over spectacle. The musical conceit and the source material pull against each other, and the seams show.
This is a sincere film built on a single ache that it never quite earns at full volume. Dinklage carries the longing on his face when the score will not carry it for him. Wright clearly loves the material and the period, and the craft is handsome throughout. The result is a romance that moves you in stretches and stalls between them. It reaches for opera and settles for a lovely, uneven sigh.