Well, Universal sent me to another preview screening, and even though I have some… uncomfortable history with the director behind this particular feature, I’ll admit that I was actually quite hopeful that this would turn out good. The last three write-ups I’ve done on the works of Joe Wright have been, in a word, disastrous. Pan and The Woman In The Window are so amazingly bad that they almost reach genius from the other side, and Darkest Hour ultimately didn’t pan out because it came out too soon after the similar (and superior, at least to me) feature Churchill.
But over time, I’ve at least made peace with the fact that these films exist, as the bread of that turd sandwich is the result of Joe Wright trying to work outside of the classically-minded, accessibly-presented, ‘ideal for high school classes studying the original text’ framework that made up the bulk of his filmography pre-Pan. They were failed experiments, but experiments nonetheless, and as soon as the trailer for his latest reached my attention, I was hoping he’d make a comeback by reminding audiences why his debut with Pride & Prejudice made as big a splash as it did: The man is talented, if given the right story to work with.
And that is precisely what he’s been given here, with an adaptation of a fairly-recent stage musical based on the classic Cyrano de Bergerac. I am once again being backed into a corner to admit that the main love story, all about the artistic expression of love through writing, appeals to the part of me that feels inspired to start writing my own poetry shortly after watching these kinds of films. It’s definitely designed for the more romantic of audiences, who understand the pleasures of finding new and inventive ways of telling a loved one how much you appreciate them, but in that mode, it works because everyone on-hand is playing all this earnest sentimentality at just the right pitch.
Not always literally, though. While the soundtrack from indie rock band The National does wonders for the film’s romantic tone and even setting, the delivery of those words is… complicated. Haley Bennett as Roxanne, the centre of the main love triangle, is far and away the best singer here, opening the film on a strong footing with Someone To Say and staying consistent throughout, with everyone else falling far into talk-singing. Dangerously close to Russell Crowe in Les Misérables talk-singing (looking at you, Ben Mendelsohn). But to Peter Dinklage’s credit, he manages to pull off the ‘Eminem singing about his daughter’ gambit, where the… vocal deficiencies, let’s say, can be forgiven because the emotions behind that voice feel so genuine. It does reach a weird point where Kelvin Harrison Jr. is actually able to harmonise with Bennett on Every Letter, a feat Dinklage never manages, which puts a bit of a kink in the romantic chemistry.
Actually, speaking of Every Letter (and I guess speaking of ‘kink’ while I’m at it), the staging and presentation for every scene here, from the spoken dialogue to the musical numbers, is downright fabulous. Wright’s knack for bringing out the theatrical roots of cinema do him a lot of favours with his staging of the dance sequences (as does Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui’s graceful and flowing choreography), and in the case of Every Letter, the blocking combined with Seamus McGarvey’s cinematography manage to bring out a certain sensual, almost physical, intimacy to the image of two lovers reading each other’s poetry. It worked for me in Vita & Virginia, and it sure as shit worked for me here.
I should mention at this point that, as is usually the case whenever I look at recent films based on classic works of literature and/or theatre, I haven’t watched a rendition of Cyrano de Bergerac before. I’m certainly familiar with its influence, as I’ve seen that stupid “I’ll tell you what words to say from off-screen” rom-com cliché enough times for it to have bore its way into my grey matter, but not the work itself. And honestly, the delivery here manages to rescue it from how tired some of its conventions have become. It’s got that same purity in its depiction of romantic love that has me returning to Romeo & Juliet over and over and over again, and the story of Cyrano himself as a man whose pride stops him from achieving true happiness is quite moving. Dinklage may struggle with the singing, but as the character across the board, he still makes it work. Having him introduced with a rap(ier) battle against a stuffy aristocrat helps too.
The pleasures afforded by a film like this are admittedly quite straight-forward: It’s a romance for people who aren’t ashamed of using terms like ‘lovey-dovey’ to describe such things. But despite my misgivings about the singing and even some of the casting (this marks the first time I’ve seen Ben Mendelsohn not work in a villain role), none of that was enough to dampen the amount of joy I experienced while watching this. It was certainly a welcome surprise from a director whose only real previous work with musical cinema was trying to turn songs by Nirvana and the Ramones into pirate shanties.
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