Nice looking fellow. Even features, crinkly eyes, a ready smile, muscles taut from gym work, autumnal hair with a fine early frost. He could be a cousin of his fellow Rocky Mountain resident Robert Redford. Then look closer and find a superhero's face as it might have been drawn by Wallace Wood for a Mad comic- book parody. The jawline, a shade too prominent, entertains the rumor of buffoonery. The smile is one of unwarranted self-assurance. His eye squint seems not to have registered that the world sees him differently: as a preening oaf. With every gesture he is screaming, Help! I'm a clown trapped in a leading man's body!
All these are signals sent out by Steve Martin, who is too smart and funny to be fit for a movie idol's straitjacket. He began, in the early 1970s, as a stand-up comic with an unusual persona: a guy determined against all odds -- lack of charm or talent, for example -- to be the life of the party. In his first movies too he made mock of his Waspy features by playing dimwits and cuckolds. Would he restrict himself to updating Jerry Lewis when he could be Cary Grant? Not at all. For with Pennies from Heaven Martin essayed nostalgic surrealism; in The Lonely Guy he was a mensch for all seasons; All of Me provided him a tour de force of physical comedy; his turn in Little Shop of Horrors boasted a wondrously manic concentration of energy. By now he was becoming the snazziest farceur, and maybe the most appealing movie comic, of the '80s. Now he had only to try a romantic lead, as if to say, I can do that. Too. Hence Roxanne.
C.D. Bales (Martin) runs the local volunteer firehouse, manned by a septet of gentle stooges. One of these is the hunky, clunky Chris (Rick Rossovich), who is attracted to a pretty astronomer named Roxanne (Daryl Hannah). C.D. goes big for her as well but is inhibited by his amiable reserve -- and by a nose that looks like a fairy-tale Nixon's after he'd told a lie. So C.D. agrees to become Chris' voice and soul, whispering the music of love for Chris to shout up to Roxanne's balcony . . . But you've heard this story before. It is Cyrano de Bergerac replanted in rural Washington State. Chivalric C.D. is no swordsman; he duels with tennis racquet and walking stick. Rostand's purple poetry is replaced with C.D.'s Hallmarkian attempt to turn palship into passion: "Why should we sip from a teacup when we can drink from the river?"
Martin, who wrote the pretty-funny, too-soppy script, means to drink from the river this time. He wants it all: laughs, tears, low comedy, uplift. It doesn't quite happen, partly because the movie begs for poignance like an orphaned puppy, partly because modern plastic surgery makes the plot anachronistic, partly because, even with his Cyranose, C.D. is a darned sight more attractive than his beefy rival. Aaaahh, who cares, as long as Steve Martin gets a chance to strut his physical grace, wrap his mouth around clever dialogue, clamber up to rooftops like a Tarzan of the Northwest, give new life to the old-fashioned nobility of the love letter, and drink wine through his nose? "Party trick," he shrugs. It's a neat trick, being Steve Martin. He's so good; his movies will get even better.