Books, Arts & Manners: Nose Dive

Is Cyrano de Bergerac, updated to America today, still possible? Steve Martin, who wrote the script of Roxanne and plays the hero—C. D. Bales, the fire chief of Nelson, an imaginary ski resort in Washington (shot in Nelson, a real ski resort in British Columbia)—obviously thinks so. I would say that in an age when chivalry is dead and plastic surgery prospering, the story no longer makes sense. Martin has solved the problem of chivalry by turning a piece of bittersweet heartbreak into a hearty comedy complete with happy ending; as for C.D.’s nose, though big enough to serve as the beginners’ ski jump, it has apparently been bobbed already and is—for some mumbled, pseudo-scientific reason—by now inoperable. I don’t buy either of these solutions: A C.D. who gets his Roxanne in the end, and whose only problem is how to kiss without his nose getting in the way, is no Cyrano—hardly even a Jimmy Durante.

So the nose stays the same, but everything else is pared down to puny, unheroic dimensions. The noble company of Gascon Cadets is now a bunch of Keystone firemen, volunteers who barely know a hose from a nose; Christian is Chris, a professional firefighter imported to bolster the volunteers, but also a stupid, illiterate lug who vomits from fright when the classy Roxanne addresses him; and Roxanne herself is a liberated astronomy student on summer vacation in sleepy Nelson, where she expects to track a comet she has discovered through a telescope hardly bigger than the smitten fire chief’s proboscis. Some shreds of Rostand’s tale surface now and then, but what has been substituted is a triple snub to that big-nosed, great-hearted, spotless-plumed hero and his story.

JS

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John Simon

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Is Cyrano de Bergerac, updated to America today, still possible? Steve Martin, who wrote the script of Roxanne and plays the hero—C. D. Bales, the fire chief of Nelson, an imaginary ski resort in Washington (shot in Nelson, a real ski resort in British Columbia)—obviously thinks so. I would say that in an age when chivalry is dead and plastic surgery prospering, the story no longer makes sense. Martin has solved the problem of chivalry by turning a piece of bittersweet heartbreak into a hearty comedy complete with happy ending; as for C.D.’s nose, though big enough to serve as the beginners’ ski jump, it has apparently been bobbed already and is—for some mumbled, pseudo-scientific reason—by now inoperable. I don’t buy either of these solutions: A C.D. who gets his Roxanne in the end, and whose only problem is how to kiss without his nose getting in the way, is no Cyrano—hardly even a Jimmy Durante.

So the nose stays the same, but everything else is pared down to puny, unheroic dimensions. The noble company of Gascon Cadets is now a bunch of Keystone firemen, volunteers who barely know a hose from a nose; Christian is Chris, a professional firefighter imported to bolster the volunteers, but also a stupid, illiterate lug who vomits from fright when the classy Roxanne addresses him; and Roxanne herself is a liberated astronomy student on summer vacation in sleepy Nelson, where she expects to track a comet she has discovered through a telescope hardly bigger than the smitten fire chief’s proboscis. Some shreds of Rostand’s tale surface now and then, but what has been substituted is a triple snub to that big-nosed, great-hearted, spotless-plumed hero and his story.