In Review: 'Cyrano,' 'Texas Chainsaw Massacre,' 'Studio 666'
A venerable play gets a musical makeover, a venerable scary movie gets a franchise-extender, and some rock stars make a horror comedy
Cyrano
Dir. Joe Wright
124 min.
There’s an inherent whimsy to the idea of turning Edmond Rostand’s oft-adapted chestnut Cyrano de Bergerac into a musical, a notion not unlike converting it into a comedy about a witty, Pinocchio-beaked fire chief who helps a hunky and spectacularly dim-witted recruit court the smartest, prettiest woman in town. But Cyrano, a screen version of Erica Schmidt’s 2018 stage play adaptation of the 1897 original, isn’t Roxanne and it fights like hell—too hard, really—to drain all the whimsy away. With new music written mostly by Aaron and Bryce Dressner, the twin brothers of the rock band The National, the film has a somber tone that’s only modestly leavened by director Joe Wright’s stylistic brio and the famed wit of Cyrano himself. This is full-on tragedy, Emo de Bergerac.
The tone suits the material well. Cyrano de Bergarac is understood as a dramatic example of the precept about beauty only running skin deep, but Schmidt’s reading—and that of her husband Peter Dinklage, who’s a soulful and affecting Cyrano—emphasizes the romantic longing of a love triangle where one man uses another as a vessel for feelings he lacks the confidence to express himself. There’s a purity to loving someone with the certainty of not having that love returned, and this Cyrano celebrates the creative and emotional power of unrequited passion. Penning his verses for another to claim isn’t an intellectual exercise for Cyrano because he believes his florid poetry, but it’s at the very least a cerebral flex.
Another distinguishing feature of this Cyrano is its lack of one: as in his wife Schmidt’s play, in which he starred, Dinklage is spared performing with a distracting prosthetic nose. He can be the Dinklage familiar to many as Tyrion Lannister in Game of Thrones, a striking figure whose dwarfism leads others—and himself—to expect that his choices in life are limited. His Cyrano, a cadet in the French army, swiftly and fatally upends a presumption about his fitness as a swordsman when he slays a challenger in public, but he’s also guilty of underestimating his appeal to Roxanne (Haley Bennett), the sharp-witted beauty he adores. When Roxanne confesses her interest in Christian de Neuvillette (Kelvin Harrison Jr.), a dashing new addition to his unit, Cyrano offers his poetry and letter-writing skills to Christian to help bring her the man she wishes.
Schmidt’s musical wisely refrains from turning the play’s most famous scenes into song-and-dance numbers, because there’s no sense in breaking over a century of theatrical convention unless you’re going to have Steve Martin feeding lines to an earnest beefcake in a trapper hat. So when Roxanne turns on the red light after Christian’s graceless in-person follow-up to love letters he didn’t write, the balcony scene that follows, with Cyrano first whispering lines to Christian before speaking himself from the shadows, proceeds as expected. Dinklage is terrific in that and other dramatic scenes—and he has to be, really, because he more song-speaks than sings during the musical numbers.
The individual songs from Cyrano are not particularly memorable, which may be a consequence of the Dressners not coming to the material as Broadway composers. But they do have an overall tenor that serves this story well, enhancing or heightening notes that were already present in Rostand’s play, like modern accents on a classic gown. The choreography has the unfortunate half-hearted quality of other non-traditional screen musicals like Dancer in the Dark, which is almost made worse by Wright’s typically robust approach to period pieces, with his active camera and energetic staging. Above all, Cyrano is a testament to the durability and malleability of this material. Make it a musical. Make it a comedy. Make it a swashbuckler. Cyrano de Bergerac is hard to screw up. —Scott Tobias
Cyrano opens in theaters tomorrow, February 25.
Studio 666
Dir: B.J. McDonnell
106 min.
Texas Chainsaw Massacre
Dir: David Blue Garcia
81 min.
A collaboration with director Michel Gondry, Foo Fighters’ video for the 1997 single “Everlong” finds the band trapped in a frequently shifting nightmarish dreamscape that’s nearly equal parts The Evil Dead and Un Chien Andalou. Both funny and disturbing, the clip both doesn’t just pay homage to classic horror films. It captures horror’s ability to visualize the same state of psychic unease suggested by Dave Grohl-penned song. It’s the work of a band and director who share a deep respect for the genre but won’t let that get in their way of trying something new within it.
The group could have stopped there. And should have. Studio 666 is a horror film Grohl and his bandmates filmed in secret after recording their 10th album, 2021’s Medicine at Midnight, at an Encino house built in the 1940s where “the vibes were definitely off but the sound was fucking on." Inspired by the experience, Grohl dreamed up a story in which — very meta — the band would play themselves attempting to record their 10th album under the same circumstances, but plagued by supernatural occurrences tied to a band named Dream Widow’s attempt to record an album in the same space decades ago. That experience didn’t end well for Dream Widow, and it quickly becomes apparent it might not for the Foo Fighters, either, when Grohl starts becoming weird and obsessive and demanding middle-of-the-night recording sessions for songs he insists must be played in the key of “L sharp.” “Do you guys get this overwhelming sense of death and doom?,” Grohl asks the others. Even so, you can’t beat the acoustics.
It’s a goof and played as such, but while Studio 666 looks like it must have been fun to make, it's rarely fun to watch. Comedy pros Whitney Cummings, Jeff Garlin, and Will Forte make appearances, but most scenes are dominated by the band’s attempts at comic mugging. As rock stars go, Pat Smear and Taylor Hawkins are probably funnier than most, but that doesn’t mean they can carry a movie, even one that plays like an elaborate in-joke that should never have gotten out.
Still, it’s telling that Studio 666 features a chainsaw death scene far more memorable than any in Texas Chainsaw Massacre, the latest attempt to turn the title of Tobe Hooper’s 1974 horror masterpiece into a horror brand for a franchise-dominated age. For inspiration it looks to David Gordon Green’s 2018 “legacyquel" Halloween, setting the action in the same continuity as the first Chainsaw film but picking up the story years later as a new generation of victims finds itself on the receiving end of Leatherface’s power tool. (And mallet. Even mindless killers like to mix it up.) It even, like Halloween, brings back the original’s final girl Sally Hardesty (Irish actress Olwen Fouéré, stepping in for the late Marilyn Burns) to confront her long-ago tormentor, having spent the years between getting buff and mean for just this moment.
The killing’s well underway by the time Sally makes her appearance. Texas Chainsaw Massacre largely sets the action in the Texas ghost town of Harlow where a group of young entrepreneurs have made plans to create a hipster oasis of cutting edge eateries and comic book shops. (The film was shot in Bulgaria, apparently taking the tagline to the infamous 1982 horror film Pieces to heart: “You don’t have to go to Texas for a chainsaw massacre!”) The only problem: they might not have finalized the purchase on a run-down orphanage run by an elderly woman (Alice Krige) who has no plans to leave. Nor does her companion, the all-grown-up last remaining orphan in her care. (Spoiler: it’s Leatherface.)
Written by Chris Thomas Devlin from a story by Fede Álvarez and Rode Sayagues (the team behind two Don’t Breathes and the Evil Dead remake) and directed by David Blue Garcia, Texas Chainsaw Makes some stabs (sorry) at satire and relevance that ultimately make it seem worse than the half-hearted, seen-it-before killfest it is. Elsie Fisher (Eighth Grade) plays the survivor of a school shooting forced to fight for her life, and in one scene Leatherface makes his way through a party bus filled with obnoxious influencers livestreaming their excursion. (“Try anything and you’re canceled, bro!” one warns. It doesn’t work.) The film made news during production when Legendary Pictures fired its original directors, but could what they were making have been much worse? In the end, the result would ultimately have been the same: a familiar name on the Netflix landing page waiting for the resigned to click. —Keith Phipps
Studio 666
Texas Chainsaw Massacre
Studio 666 opens in theaters tomorrow, February 25. Texas Chainsaw Massacre is now playing on Netflix.
Finally, an opportunity to see Dave Grohl on television...
Having very little time for movies at present, I somehow contrived to make the Texas Chainsaw Massacre the first one I watched in 2022. It was pretty bad, but somehow not as bad as I thought it would be.