Cyrano (Movie)

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    Why Is ‘Cyrano’ Still So Potent? Ask Anyone Who’s Loved at All.

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    The 19th-century French play is quite adaptable, as numerous stage and film versions have shown, including the latest musical starring Peter Dinklage.When the French playwright Edmond Rostand penned “Cyrano de Bergerac” in the late 19th century, he couldn’t have imagined its durability — translations into countless languages, stage productions across the world and several high-profile film adaptations. The newest of those, “Cyrano” (opening in theaters Feb. 25), supplements Rostand’s beloved story with musical numbers by members of the rock band the National — a decidedly contemporary touch. But this is nothing new; Rostand’s has proved a malleable text, and its film adaptations tell us much about the kind of stories audiences were responding to when they were made.The 1950 “Cyrano de Bergerac” (streaming on Paramount+) starred José Ferrer, who had played the title role on Broadway in the mid-1940s, winning a Tony for his turn. It’s a classical approach, presentational (the proscenium arch of the stage isn’t visible, but it may as well be), with little attempt at realism in its playing or setting.Though greatly abridged, the script is quite faithful to the story beats of the original play. Cyrano de Bergerac is, we are told, a “soldier, poet, philosopher, magician, playwright … and the best swordsman in Paris.” He is also blessed (or, he believes, cursed) with an enormous, lengthy nose. He’s boisterously self-confident, except in matters of love. Self-conscious of his appearance (“Me, whom the plainest woman would despise”), he keeps his affections hidden from his beloved cousin, Roxane (Mala Powers), and his fears are confirmed when she asks him to set her up with the handsome Christian (William Prince), “because you have always been my friend.”But when Cyrano discovers that Christian is clueless in the ways of romance and hopelessly tongue-tied in the company of the fairer sex, Cyrano comes up with a solution: He’ll write love letters for Christian, providing an outlet for his own affection while giving Roxane the perfect man she desires. “Together we could make one mighty hero of romance,” Cyrano assures Christian, writing a flurry of letters and even standing in for him (vocally, that is) when Christian stands under Roxane’s balcony late one night, barely out of her sight, to woo her.The film and the original play end in tragedy. Christian and Roxane are wed just before he and Cyrano are sent to war, and when Christian dies in battle, his secret dies with him; Roxane enters a convent in mourning, and Cyrano only confesses to authoring the letters just before his own death years later.The 1950 “Cyrano de Bergerac” was mainly a showcase for the performance of José Ferrer (opposite Mala Powers as Roxane). John Springer Collection/Corbis, via Getty ImagesThe film won Ferrer an Oscar for best actor but scored no other nominations, which sounds about right: Michael Gordon’s direction is competent and Dimitri Tiomkin’s music is inspired, but this “Cyrano” serves mostly as a record of a masterful performance. (A 1990 film version, starring Gérard Depardieu, is a more satisfying “traditional” take.)Yet the film was striking enough to make an impression on Steve Martin, who saw it on television at the age of 12 and never forgot it, spending the next several decades quietly harboring a desire to play the role.“I had no intention of writing the script myself,” he told The Times in 1987; at that point, he had only penned “The Jerk” and other broad comedies. “I was afraid of it. You’re playing with fire when you tamper with a classic. So I went looking for a writer. But it was such a personal idea, and anyone I would give it to would make it his own. It’s hard to ask Neil Simon to write your idea.”So Martin spent four years writing it himself, soliciting suggestions for updates and modifications from everyone from former collaborators Carl Reiner and Herbert Ross to the author Gore Vidal. In “Roxanne,” released in 1987 (and streaming on Hulu), Cyrano de Bergerac has become C.D. Bales (Martin), a firefighter, a wit, an “encyclopedia,” an acrobat, a chef and (obviously) a writer. The movie is filled with markers of the era: a saxophone-heavy jazz score, copious casual drug references, a gender flip for our hero’s best friend. Roxanne (Daryl Hannah), now spelled with another “n,” is a brainy astronomer; Christian is now “Chris” (Rick Rossovich), a hunky firefighter.Five Movies to Watch This WinterCard 1 of 51. “The Power of the Dog”: More

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      ‘Cyrano’ Review: Who Wrote the Book of Love?

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      Peter Dinklage wields pen and sword in a musical adaptation of the durable French romance.Cyrano de Bergerac is a lover and a fighter, but when we first meet him he is indulging in a brutal bit of theater criticism. Played with grace and gusto by Peter Dinklage, Cyrano emerges from a standing-room-only crowd to berate a pompous actor and drive him from the stage. With cutting rhymes and a sharp sword, he defends dramatic truth against the woeful thespian’s powdered preening. The audience, which had paid to see Cyrano’s victim, nonetheless mostly applauds his humiliation. The few who object are marked as fools, phonies or outright villains.Artifice mobilized in defense of authenticity. It’s a paradox as old as art, and one that “Cyrano,” a new screen musical based on Edmond Rostand’s French-class chestnut, embraces with a risky ardor. Directed by Joe Wright, with songs by members of the National (Bryce and Aaron Dessner wrote the music, with lyrics by Matt Berninger and Carin Besser) and a script by Erica Schmidt, this version wears its heart on its ruffled sleeve, pursuing its lush, breathless vision of romance with more sincerity than coherence.The original Cyrano, first performed in 1897, was an artful throwback to the poetic dramas of the 17th century, written in Alexandrine couplets and infused with lofty, archaic notions of love and honor. In the decades since, the story has become familiar through countless variations and adaptations. Cyrano, a soldier ashamed of his large, misshapen nose, is in love with Roxanne, who is smitten with a callow cutie named Christian. Cyrano uses his literary talents to woo Roxanne in Christian’s name. Each man becomes the other’s proxy. “I will make you eloquent, and you will make me handsome,” Cyrano says.The resulting confusion produces both comedy — a tangle of crossed signals and mistaken identities — and tragedy. Some versions soften or eliminate the tragedy, like Fred Schepisi’s sweet “Roxanne” (1987), starring Steve Martin and Daryl Hannah, and the recent Netflix teen charmer “The Half of It.” Wright and Schmidt’s “Cyrano,” which originated onstage in 2019, charges in the other direction, telegraphing its heartache in lyrics and building toward an operatic, death-haunted end.Along the way, it supplies some moments of fun, mostly thanks to Dinklage and Ben Mendelsohn as his conniving, predatory nemesis, the Duke De Guiche. He too is smitten with Roxanne (Haley Bennett), and as a high-ranking military officer holds the fates of Cyrano and Christian (Kelvin Harrison Jr.) in his hands. Mendelsohn excels at playing silky, sadistic bad guys like this, and he offers himself as a perfect foil to Dinklage, whose Cyrano is acerbic, cantankerous and openhearted.His small stature rather than his large nose makes this Cyrano think himself unworthy of Roxanne, who sees him as a close friend and confidant. She and Christian have an immediate physical spark, efficiently conveyed through smoldering glances. Bennett and Harrison do their part to infuse a technically chaste courtship with an element of horniness. Her cheeks are in a state of permanent semi-blush, and he conveys stammering, tongue-tied desire.They almost upstage Cyrano’s words, which are meant to supply the conduit for a truer form of love. Rostand’s play is built on an emotional rendering of the mind-body problem. Together, Cyrano and Christian add up to a perfect man — word and image, spirit and flesh, agape and eros — but only insofar as they succeed in deceiving Roxanne. Even though there is only one of her, she is also divided between the cerebral and the sensual dimensions of love.At one point, Wright tries to bridge this gap by staging part of a musical number in Roxanne’s bedroom, where she reads Christian’s — that is, Cyrano’s — letters in a state of soft-focus ecstasy, pressing the pages against her lips and bosom as she tumbles across the duvet. The earnest preposterousness of this sequence, which might have worked on MTV sometime in the early ’90s, is representative of the movie’s silliness and its longing for sublimity.A musical should be capable of embracing both. But Wright, while a canny craftsman, is too committed to good taste to go over the top into either melodrama or camp. The music strikes a pretty good balance between rock ’n’ roll economy and show-tune extravagance, though the soundtrack is like an album of second-best songs. Only a plaintive anthem sung by soldiers on the eve of battle stands out, partly because its sentimentality has little to do with the central love triangle.Five Movies to Watch This WinterCard 1 of 51. “The Power of the Dog”: More

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      Peter Dinklage Calls Disney’s ‘Snow White’ Remake ‘Backward’

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      On Monday’s episode of Marc Maron’s “WTF” podcast, the “Game of Thrones” star Peter Dinklage said he was stunned to learn that Disney was doing a live-action remake of the 1937 animated film “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs” — and more so, that Disney was proud to announce that it had cast a Latina actress, Rachel Zegler (“West Side Story”), as the lead.“Literally no offense to anything, but I was sort of taken aback,” said Dinklage, who won four Emmys for his role in the HBO fantasy epic. “They were very proud to cast a Latino actress as Snow White, but you’re still telling the story of ‘Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.’ Take a step back and look at what you’re doing there. It makes no sense to me.”“You’re progressive in one way,” he continued, “but you’re still making that [expletive] backward story about seven dwarfs living in a cave together.”“Have I done nothing to advance the cause from my soapbox?” he asked. “I guess I’m not loud enough.”Dinklage, who stars in the upcoming film “Cyrano,” an adaptation of Edmond Rostand’s classic play “Cyrano de Bergerac,” said he was not opposed to a remake of the classic fairy tale, as long as it were given a “cool, progressive spin,” he said. “Let’s do it. All in.”In a statement on Tuesday, a Disney spokesperson said that “to avoid reinforcing stereotypes from the original animated film, we are taking a different approach with these seven characters and have been consulting with members of the dwarfism community.” Disney added that the film was still a long way out from production.Marc Webb will direct the new “Snow White,” and Gal Gadot has been cast as the Evil Queen. More

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      Peter Dinklage on ‘Cyrano’ and Life After ‘Game of Thrones’

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      Peter Dinklage doesn’t consider himself much of a singer, and swordfighting is outside his usual area of expertise. But the opportunity to master those skills is precisely what appealed to him about the new movie musical “Cyrano,” which Dinklage leads as a crooning, jousting poet.“I’ve got to be intimidated by it,” he said. “Anything that scares me gets my interest.”The 52-year-old actor first tackled the material in a stage musical written and directed by Erica Schmidt, Dinklage’s wife, with songs written by members of the band the National. After an Off Broadway premiere in late 2019, Schmidt’s “Cyrano” has now been made into a lavish film directed by Joe Wright (“Atonement”), which finds the title character covertly courting his true love, Roxanne (Haley Bennett), in the form of letters sent by the besotted soldier Christian (Kelvin Harrison Jr.).Of course, that begs a very contemporary question: Did Cyrano de Bergerac invent catfishing? Though the new film retains the period setting of the 1897 Edmond Rostand play it was based on, Dinklage detects many modern-day parallels. “It’s exactly what we’re doing today with online dating, where you’re putting up a profile of yourself out there that is not necessarily true to who you are,” he said. “We all pretend to be other people to varying degrees.”Dinklage with Haley Bennett in the new movie musical “Cyrano.”Peter Mountain/MGMBut few pretend better than Dinklage, a four-time Emmy winner who played the sly and short-statured Tyrion Lannister for eight seasons of “Game of Thrones,” culminating with its controversial finale in May 2019.“‘Game of Thrones’ wasn’t really a TV show — it was like my life,” Dinklage said. “My family was there in Ireland six months out of every year, for almost 10 years. You dig roots down there, my daughter was going to school there. She developed an Irish accent because she was with little Irish kids all day long.”Still, in a recent and wide-ranging conversation via video call, Dinklage told me that he has found life since “Game of Thrones” to be quite liberating: “You feel this void, but then you also go, ‘Oh, wow. I don’t have to do that, so what am I going to do next?’ That’s the exciting thing.”Here are edited excerpts from our conversation.It’s my understanding that your wife, Erica, was fairly far along in adapting “Cyrano” before you read it and decided to star in it. What convinced you?Yeah, she was commissioned to write an adaptation of “Cyrano,” and she had the great idea of stripping it down to its bare essentials, replacing the long monologues about love with love songs. Most importantly for me, I finally connected with it because she got rid of Cyrano’s most famous attribute, which is the obviously fake nose on the handsome actor’s face.I’m an actor, I’ve worn prosthetics before, but the pretense of that didn’t jive with me. I’d always thought, “What’s the big deal? You get to take that off at the end of the show.” And then Erica removed it and I thought I had to play this part because now it’s about a guy who doesn’t know what to do in the face of love, who has nothing to blame but himself.What do you mean by that?I think Cyrano is in love with love, and so many of us are, but we have no idea what it is. I always jump ahead and think, well, what if Cyrano really got what he wanted? Would he and Roxanne start to annoy each other? Because he keeps her on a pedestal, is that why he loves her? I think so many people do that. They don’t want to get too close. They want to know the good stuff without the bad.How did you feel about love when you were in your 20s? Were you in love with the idea of love?Yeah, I think so. I think there’s a “Wuthering Heights” quality to all love when you’re younger, you know? “Romeo and Juliet” wasn’t written for 40-year-olds. I was guilty of always falling for someone where it wasn’t reciprocated, because keeping it at a distance is more romantic than bringing it up close. You fall for people you know aren’t going to return that, so it’s even more tormented, and you’re not interested in the people interested in you. That’s how my brain worked because I was a self-saboteur when I was young.When it comes to love, Dinklage said, “I was a self-saboteur when I was young.”Justin J Wee for The New York TimesHow do you grapple with that?You get a bit older and you realize that has nothing to do with anything. But it’s OK, because in your 20s, everybody should be a mess. I meet so many ambitious, professional young people in their 20s and they have everything together, and it seems like they haven’t made any of those really important mistakes, as opposed to when me and my friends were in New York in our early 20s and we’d go out drinking all night and smoke cigarettes and howl at the moon. We were all just fools, and it was fun.Do you remember the first time you met Erica?Of course. It was about 18 years ago now. We were all at a friend’s house and someone said, “They’re walking the elephants through the Queens-Midtown Tunnel.” The circus was in town and it was snowing, and they were walking the elephants through Manhattan, a long line of them. It was like something out of a beautiful, fantastical, end-of-the-world, crazy, romantic movie. See? I always think about movies. So that’s the night we met, the night the elephants walked through Manhattan.By that point, had you been able to move past your tendency to torment yourself about love?I don’t think you do that. I think other people do that to you. If anybody’s been lucky enough to experience love, it just grabs hold of you. You don’t control how you feel, but you can choose what to do with it.Which is part of the issue with Cyrano, who may feel unworthy of love.I was raised Irish Catholic, so I totally feel unworthy of everything. That’s what hopefully this movie is speaking to, that unworthiness we all go through. When you meet somebody you love, they’re suddenly so important and so powerful that of course your go-to is, “I’m not worthy of this, because why would I be? This is so much bigger than me.”Do you think Erica removed the fake nose and reconceived Cyrano because she had you in mind for the role?Subconsciously, perhaps, because we had worked together before and we’re partners in life. But I definitely think she wasn’t just replacing the nose with my size in terms of a physical difference of the character. She just wanted to unearth. It’s kind of what I do: Every time I approach a role, I’m not just approaching it as someone my size, I’m approaching it as a flesh-and-blood human being with many more complications to the character.It’s so funny, just talking about this movie, I’m asked, “How does it feel to play a leading man?” That’s still part of the conversation because we’re still inundated by clichés. The domain of romantic leads has been beautiful white people for a hundred years now. That’s just what we’ve been served up, like Burger King, and then if we eat it, they’re going to make more of it. But my favorite filmmakers have been the ones who take risks, like Hal Ashby. I just worship “Harold and Maude” because look at who the romantic characters are. It’s a brilliant movie.Dinklage opposite Jasmine Cephas Jones and Blake Jenner in the stage version of “Cyrano.”Jeenah Moon for The New York TimesIn the ’90s, you gave an interview where you said, “What I really want is to play the romantic lead and get the girl.”I think I was speaking more to the idea that they get to thread the whole narrative, and that’s sort of a joy. I had been playing a number of fun parts, but they were supporting parts. Behind the curtain of filmmaking, so much of it is continuity of character: If you come in for one or two scenes, you can just lay some dynamite, have some fun, and then you’re out of there, but there’s no real arc to your storytelling.I think what’s fascinating about “Game of Thrones” and why a lot of actors are now drawn to television, is because they get to do that slow burn. For example, if you take the character of Tyrion’s brother Jaime, he pushes a little kid out the window at the end of the first episode, but two seasons later, he’s a hero to the audience. It’s like, did you forget he pushed a kid out the window? It’s crazy the way you can just surf this narrative and take it wherever you want to go. I got to do that with Tyrion and you get to do that in the movie if you’re the lead, though you have to condense it a little bit more.What was it like to be famous at the height of “Game of Thrones” mania?It’s myriad different reactions I get on a daily basis. People mean well, but when you’re walking down the street with your kid and people take your picture without asking … I start to talk this way and then I stop myself, because for an actor to complain about that reflects poorly on you. Everybody is like, “You have a great life. What’s wrong with me taking your picture? You’re a performer, that’s my right.”But it’s not about that. It’s more about just on a human level, I’m not a zoo animal. I’m a person. Let’s say I’m having a really bad day, or I just got off the phone and you’re right in my face. Am I supposed to smile for you? And why aren’t you actually communicating with me? More often than not, people take pictures without asking, and sometimes when I respond, even kindly, they don’t say anything because they’re almost surprised I’m talking to them. It’s really wild. If you’re a fan of what I do, why would you pay me back with that?Dinklage with Sophie Turner in “Game of Thrones.”Helen Sloan/HBOSo what’s your read on why they act that way?I think a lot of people are totally removed from each other. Camera phones have become like fingers, an extension of themselves, and they don’t even think about it because that’s how everybody’s living. Much more famous actors than me can walk down Broadway if they hide themselves correctly, but I’m unable to do that, so it can be hard. I moved to New York City to be anonymous: “Who cares? Nobody looks twice.” And now, because of the technology, everybody does.George R.R. Martin wanted “Game of Thrones” to go on for two more seasons. Do you think it should have, or was that the right time to end?It was the right time. No less, no more. You don’t want to wear out your welcome, although I’m not sure that show could have. But I think the reason there was some backlash about the ending is because they were angry at us for breaking up with them. We were going off the air and they didn’t know what to do with their Sunday nights anymore. They wanted more, so they backlashed about that.We had to end when we did, because what the show was really good at was breaking preconceived notions: Villains became heroes, and heroes became villains. If you know your history, when you track the progress of tyrants, they don’t start off as tyrants. I’m talking about, spoiler alert, what happened at the end of “Game of Thrones” with that character change. It’s gradual, and I loved how power corrupted these people. What happens to your moral compass when you get a taste of power? Human beings are complicated characters, you know?I think some people really did want a happily-ever-after ending, even though “Game of Thrones” told us it was not that show from the very beginning.They wanted the pretty white people to ride off into the sunset together. By the way, it’s fiction. There’s dragons in it. Move on. [Laughs] No, but the show subverts what you think, and that’s what I love about it. Yeah, it was called “Game of Thrones,” but at the end, the whole dialogue when people would approach me on the street was, “Who’s going to be on the throne?” I don’t know why that was their takeaway because the show really was more than that.One of my favorite moments was when the dragon burned the throne because it sort of just killed that whole conversation, which is really irreverent and kind of brilliant on behalf of the show’s creators: “Shut up, it’s not about that.” They constantly did that, where you thought one thing and they delivered another. Everybody had their own stories going on while watching that show, but nobody’s was as good as what the show delivered, I think. More