Cyrano

Dinklage is not much of a singer nor a swordsman, and his acting is rather uneven throughout the picture, but he nails the play's iconic balcony scene. As Cyrano speaks his heart to Roxanne, the woman he has always secretly loved, knowing that she believes his poetic declarations are coming from another whose beauty has captured her heart, Dinklage's large, sad eyes convey deep longing and palpable sadness. Unfortunately, Haley Bennett (Music and Lyrics, The Magnificent Seven, Hillbilly Elegy) puts her Roxanne across as shallow and flighty. Not so much that we don’t understand why Cyrano would fall in love with her, but since few in the audience will likely fall for this Roxanne—as we do in many other film adaptations of this play—this tragedy won't access most viewers' heartstrings. The rest of the cast is a hodgepodge of actors who all seem like they’ve run in from filming other movies, got into make-up much too quickly, and were given no instruction from the director as to the film's tone. But this lack of coherence is fully in line with every other aspect of the picture. This is a story set in 17th Century France, with the American and Australian actors speaking with contemporary inflexions and colloquialisms, peppered with songs that sound like modern pop with electronica and country music inflexions, while the dance numbers and production values that feel like a music video from the late '80s. 

With the exception of Bennett's numbers and a brief song that features Glen Hansard and Sam Amidon, all the singing seems deliberately performed to sound like amateurs pushing the melodies through their characters' emotional sates rather than belting out showstoppers to the back row. This everyman quality to the musical numbers would be fine were it not for the fact that each of these non-singers sounds autotuned. However, I can’t tell if they really are autotuned or if the weird score by the Dressner brothers just sounds like it was written on some early ‘90s computer composing program that gives all the melodies an unnatural quality. Regardless, this latest version of Cyrano de Bergerac is more of a curiosity than a triumph—the exact opposite of what this character would want to be remembered as.