This movie is certainly a mixed bag, with great positives and some definite failures, but it's well worth the price of admission.
Far and away the best thing about this movie, for me, was the remarkably imaginative direction of Joe Wright. I've seen a fair number of movie adaptations of Rostand's play, and none comes close to this in creative directorial imagination. Most are bogged down in memories of how the play looks in the theater. Not Wright. He keeps this moving, cutting from here to there, inserting this scene in that scene, etc. I would have guessed the movie ran less than 90 minutes. I was astounded to see it had lasted just over two hours. Wright and his camerafolk really did a spectacular job here.
The acting is also uniformly good. Ben Mendelsohn makes a caricature out of de Guiche, but in this very truncated version of Rostand's play, I guess that doesn't matter. Harrison is very good as Christian, which is why it's a shame that the script made him barely literate. Harrison is given room to act in his last scene, with Cyrano on the battlefield, and he does a fine job. Dinklage and Bennett are good as the leads, Cyrano and Roxane.
The two major weaknesses here are the script and the songs. The songs are all unremarkable, and sometimes the lyrics are downright embarrassing. The script is alright when it sticks with prose, but when it goes for verse, as in Act I, it sounds like a bad high school effort. If you can't write great poetry-and Rostand's poetry for this play is often astoundingly beautiful-you should either stick to prose or find a good poet.
On the positive side, the script does a good job of cutting Rostand's very long and complex play down to a much abbreviated version.
My major caveat here is with the language. Cyrano, in the original play, is a master of two kinds of language: the very clever and the beautifully romantic. It is a distinction he makes very clear during the balcony scene-which is nicely adapted here. Christian here says that he is afraid to woo Roxane because he isn't capable of clever language. But in this movie, unlike in the play, we don't see Roxane captivated by whit, just by romantic verse. That would have taken some rewriting, of course, but I think it would have made certain things clearer. If there isn't time to show Roxane enamored of both, they should just have left out the business about whit and limited the discussion to beautiful romantic language.
And then they should have brought on board a real poet who could write some for Cyrano.
Most people won't be bothered by this if they just see the movie once. If you've read the original play and seen the other movie versions, however, it will bother you.
There is also the issue of Christian's race. The actor who plays him, Harrison, is Black, but no one mentions that. It would have been a chance to develop Roxane's freedom of spirit to mention it and then show that it wasn't a problem for her.
There are lots of great moments from the play that aren't carried over here. But so it goes. This is not a movie of the play, it's a movie of a musical adaptation of the play. Better to accept it for what it is than to complain about what it is not and was not trying to be.
All that said, this is still one very enjoyable movie.
Far and away the best thing about this movie, for me, was the remarkably imaginative direction of Joe Wright. I've seen a fair number of movie adaptations of Rostand's play, and none comes close to this in creative directorial imagination. Most are bogged down in memories of how the play looks in the theater. Not Wright. He keeps this moving, cutting from here to there, inserting this scene in that scene, etc. I would have guessed the movie ran less than 90 minutes. I was astounded to see it had lasted just over two hours. Wright and his camerafolk really did a spectacular job here.
The acting is also uniformly good. Ben Mendelsohn makes a caricature out of de Guiche, but in this very truncated version of Rostand's play, I guess that doesn't matter. Harrison is very good as Christian, which is why it's a shame that the script made him barely literate. Harrison is given room to act in his last scene, with Cyrano on the battlefield, and he does a fine job. Dinklage and Bennett are good as the leads, Cyrano and Roxane.
The two major weaknesses here are the script and the songs. The songs are all unremarkable, and sometimes the lyrics are downright embarrassing. The script is alright when it sticks with prose, but when it goes for verse, as in Act I, it sounds like a bad high school effort. If you can't write great poetry-and Rostand's poetry for this play is often astoundingly beautiful-you should either stick to prose or find a good poet.
On the positive side, the script does a good job of cutting Rostand's very long and complex play down to a much abbreviated version.
My major caveat here is with the language. Cyrano, in the original play, is a master of two kinds of language: the very clever and the beautifully romantic. It is a distinction he makes very clear during the balcony scene-which is nicely adapted here. Christian here says that he is afraid to woo Roxane because he isn't capable of clever language. But in this movie, unlike in the play, we don't see Roxane captivated by whit, just by romantic verse. That would have taken some rewriting, of course, but I think it would have made certain things clearer. If there isn't time to show Roxane enamored of both, they should just have left out the business about whit and limited the discussion to beautiful romantic language.
And then they should have brought on board a real poet who could write some for Cyrano.
Most people won't be bothered by this if they just see the movie once. If you've read the original play and seen the other movie versions, however, it will bother you.
There is also the issue of Christian's race. The actor who plays him, Harrison, is Black, but no one mentions that. It would have been a chance to develop Roxane's freedom of spirit to mention it and then show that it wasn't a problem for her.
There are lots of great moments from the play that aren't carried over here. But so it goes. This is not a movie of the play, it's a movie of a musical adaptation of the play. Better to accept it for what it is than to complain about what it is not and was not trying to be.
All that said, this is still one very enjoyable movie.