Joe Wright’s Cyrano Brings Peter Dinklage and The National Together

The best way to enjoy a musical is to embrace the surrealism of regular-seeming people suddenly breaking into choreographed song in the middle of their day. Filmmaker Damien Chazelle, during the press tour for his 2016 musical La La Land, told Vogue that he didn’t like musicals until he started to understand them as part of “the avant-garde tradition.”

“It was willful defiance,” he said. “Fuck it, we’re going to break into song.”

That brings us to Cyrano, the new release from Pride & Prejudice director Joe Wright. It’s definitely a musical — unlike most of the other adaptations of the century-old story. Indeed, people stop their conversations and military drills to sing, and the sets are stage-like. 

But taking into consideration Chazelle’s outlook on the genre, it’s not an altogether unpleasant experience. 

The adaptation is itself based on an adaptation — a musical first staged in 2018 with some of the same cast members and music. Erica Schmidt wrote both the stage play and the film, and her husband, Game of Thrones’ Peter Dinklage, reprises his role as Cyrano de Bergerac. Here Dinklage’s dwarfism stands in for the original character’s outsized nose as the driver of narrative tension. The production is a full-on family affair: Wright’s wife Haley Bennett, also a veteran of the stage play, portrays the legendary Roxanne, the object of Cyrano’s love and poetry who instead falls for a member of Cyrano’s military unit. 

The story, which is as much about poetry and lyricism as it is about love, is perfectly suited for the musical treatment. Members of acclaimed indie-rock band The National wrote the songs for both the play and the film, and though Dinklage’s voice won’t blow anyone away, it’s in a sense just right for the realm of Matt Berninger, The National’s baritone lead singer. Close your eyes and Dinklage’s low, talky growl could be mistaken for Berninger’s, or maybe a cousin’s. (It also made me wish that Game of Thrones produced a one-off musical episode like Scrubs or The Simpsons.) Bennett’s voice, on the other hand, is the ideal companion to her character’s narratively required beauty. 

Rounding out the relatively small cast are Ben Mendelsohn and Kelvin Harrison Jr. Mendelsohn plays the dastardly De Guiche — a delicious portrayal by the king of such villainy — while up-and-comer Harrison is easy to believe as the source of Roxanne’s palpitations.  

There’s a reason Cyrano de Bergerac has been adapted and riffed on repeatedly for generations. The story itself — of a hot person teaming with a brilliant person to woo a person who is both hot and brilliant — feels like one that has always existed, in some form or another. And this latest version achieves that; it’s entertaining simply because it’s Cyrano. But Dinklage’s acting, Bennett’s singing and the National-adjacent music all add to the experience. 

If you can appreciate Peter Dinklage sword fighting and singing The National songs as part of “the avant-garde tradition,” you’ll get a kick out of Joe Wright’s Cyrano.