Written by Steve Martin
Directed by Fred Schepisi
Warner Brothers
The keynote of Roxanne, the charming Steve Martin-Fred Schepisi modernization of Cyrano de Bergerac, is sounded very early in the film. C. D. Bales, a gallant fire chief with a proboscidean nose, is on his way to join a friend for breakfast when he encounters two Yuppie bullies on their way to golf. Not even noticing his nose at first in the dim morning light, they insist he step aside. While Cyrano, a Gascon fire-eater, would never give an inch, C. D. cedes the entire width of the sidewalk. He doesn’t want to fight. Then a side view discloses THE FEATURE. “Hey, fella, did anyone ever tell you that you have a big–.” “Don’t. Just. Don’t. Say. It.” But they do and the fight is on, their golf clubs against his tennis racket. C. D.’s returns are rapid, hilarious, and right on target. No one is seriously hurt but the bullies are left horizontal, dreaming of a world where the butts of cruel jokes can’t fight back.
C. D. doesn’t want to fight, but he’s quite willing to. He’s a Cyrano without bile. Rather than being a soldier who puts enemy cities to the torch, C. D. puts fires out. Nor does he scorch his enemies with satirical pamphlets. Why should he, since he doesn’t live in a bustling Paris always eager for scandal or a brawl but in a small northwestern resort town where the locals all know and Aite him. In the great Nose Tirade the speech in which the hero contemptuously shows a bravo how insults to the schnozz should really be delivered), both Cyrano and C. D. deliver the line
Ah, do you love the little birds
So much that when they come and sing to you
You give them this to perch on?
With Cyrano, the line is just his latest brilliant verbal flourish. But C. D., while mulling over his latest billet-doux to Roxanne, really does take a bird singing outside his window and perch it on his nose. This is a very sweet character.
In a very sweet movie, which knows its own limits. These limits are the limitations of our American society: the emotional anarchy of our mating rites, our tendency to look askance at the beau geste, our disparagement of eloquence, and our incomprehension of tragedy. Roxanne‘s makers move gracefully within these limits, cater to these limitations, and have succeeded in making a laid-back, gracefully daffy comedy, lightly brushed with a sadness that never settles into the heart of the story.
Cyrano is more than sad. Though Rostand subtitled his 1897 play an “heroic comedy,” it is basically a tragedy, dealing with a woman who works herself into an ecstasy of love but who cannot truly perceive what it is that she loves. Plato would have embraced Rostand for dramatically demonstrating the pain that results when love does not attain to wisdom and self-knowledge. Roxane’s idea of a lover is someone who is perfect physically and who can express himself with unstinted eloquence. She makes no allowance for human frailty. Cyrano, superb poet and brilliant conversationalist though he is, falls short of Roxane’s ideal because he has a psychological block in the presence of women. Both Christian and Cyrano are Roxane’s victims because they are both dwarfed by the shadow of her ideal lover. But by working together, Cyrano speaking from the shadows and Christian miming in the light, they become that perfect lover. Steve Martin shows his understanding of this in the moment when, right after C. D. has successfully wooed Roxanne, Chris embraces his pal and exclaims, “She wants us!” Exactly. But “us” doesn’t exist. In the play this fact leads to tragedy because Rostand’s Roxane is willful to the point of cruelty. Even though she insists that there be more to her lover than a nice appearance, she herself cannot see beyond appearances. She wants perfection and the two men die while trying to give it to her.
But Martin, wanting to make not a swashbuckling tragedy but a romantic comedy, turns Roxane into a sweet girl who has been used and abused by a lover who was all looks and no grey matter. Because Martin has modernized the story, his heroine is no virgin dreaming of perfection, but a post-Pill, post-Women’s Liberation graduate student who at first simply wants a “meaningful relationship.”
But once she reads C.D.’s passionate ghost writing mailed under Chris’s name, she feels an agitation new to her. There is an immensely poignant moment between Chris and Roxanne on the front porch of her house. He stands tongue-tied before her. Puzzled, she tells him to “Say something.” Then a sudden softness suffuses Daryl Hannah’s face. “Say something romantic.” It’s a perfectly banal sentence but, by using just the right inflection, the actress makes us understand that Roxanne has, like most of us, long since resigned herself to the unending drizzle of everyday conversation, the relative coarseness with which even the most tender feelings are nowadays expressed. Perhaps she has even resigned herself to the possibility that coarseness of expression faithfully reflects coarseness of sentiment. (But, hey, what’s a girl gonna do? There ain’t enough men to go around.)
Faced with a man who seems able to speak like an angel, she finds herself wanting to be his muse. She feels within herself an unsuspected strength: the power to inspire. This moment is much more appealing than its equivalent in the Rostand play, where Roxane impatiently prompts Christian as if he were a poetry machine that only needed a little kicking to get properly started. The seventeenth century bluestocking claimed eloquent wooing as he due; but the film’s liberated grad student discovers eloquence as a force that she has miraculously elicited. No wonder she blows her top when Chris, momentarily deprived of C. D.’s coaching, starts sputtering in Hefnereese (“I wanna fluff your pillows!”). He has let her peek into Paradise and then slammed the door in her face.
Though Martin’s eloquence has always been physical rather than verbal, he seems to know just how much of Rostand he can quote intact, how much must be translated into colloquialism, and how much should be jettisoned. Of course he’s stuck with a problem that probably never even occurred to Rostand: the need to rationalize the hero’s eloquence. To Martin’s credit, he doesn’t waste his time and ours by giving his character some corny monologue explaining how he sought refuge in language when he knew he wouldn’t be loved, etc.. Rather, he shows us how C. D.’s eloquence has naturally evolved out of what F. W. Dupee once called “the sad, ludicrous, but profoundly significant human habit of talking to oneself,” a habit that all freakish and/or talented people fall into.
C. D. is shown talking to himself from the very first shot of the movie, joking to himself, cheering himself up, creating instant skits of which he can be the hero. Steve Martin, originally a stand-up comic, may have trained himself that way during his own adolescence, and he understands the pathos as well as the absurdity of the habit. When C. D. is forced to woo Roxanne while concealing himself in shadow, he carries out this task as a sort of exalted thinking-out-loud; he is a monologuist who has as last found his audience. And the self- entranced expression on his face isn’t smug. Martin, who achieved fame by mocking smarminess and pomposity (“well, excu-u-u-se me!”), shows us a Cyrano surprised by his own eloquence, humbled by it, humbled by the love which that eloquence provokes in the woman he loves but cannot hope to win.
The most significant difference between Roxanne and Cyrano is in the way Martin portrays his modern Christian’s lack of eloquence. In the play, Christian is a gallant soldier whose verbal ineptitude is just as much a cruel joke of nature as Cyrano’s nose. Christian has the heart of a tender lover; he simply can’t express his finer feelings. But the movie Chris’s verbal coarseness is an index of the young man’s spiritual coarseness. Without C. D.’s words to do his wooing, Chris falls back on the Playboy Philosophy. Rostand’s Christian, struck dumb, stutters “I love you” over and over. And he means it. But the movie Chris, verbally depleted, can only assure Roxanne that he thinks she’s “really built.” Alas, he means it.
Rostand’s Christian deserves what he gets: Roxane’s love. The film’s Chris, a good-hearted lout, deserves what he gets: the attentions of a pretty, stupid barmaid who’s “into” astrology and blackjack, and with whom Chris runs off to Reno, leaving Roxanne free to realize her mistake and wind up in the arms of C. D. This simply may have been Steve Martin’s device for producing a happy ending, but it accomplishes something much more than that. In the Rostand play, verbal ineptitude frustrates a gallant soul. In Martin’s screenplay, verbal ineptitude reveals a shallow soul. Incredibly enough, a comedian of the 1980s has, in a movie, paid a greater implicit tribute to language than a fin de siecle poet did in a five act play couched in rhymed alexandrines.
And that comedian, together with a talented Australian director, has also made the most charming movie of the past summer.