The Greatest Showman
Directed by: Michael Gracey
Written by: Jenny Hicks and Bill Condon
Starring: Hugh Jackman, Zac Efron, Michelle Williams, Zendaya, Keala Settle, Rebecca Ferguson, Sam Humphrey, Paul Sparks, Yahya Abdul-Mateen II, Cameron Seely, Austyn Johnson, Ellis Rubin, Skylar Dunn, Gayle Rankin
Biography/Drama/Musical - 105 min Reviewed by Charlie Juhl on 20 Dec 2017
Written by: Jenny Hicks and Bill Condon
Starring: Hugh Jackman, Zac Efron, Michelle Williams, Zendaya, Keala Settle, Rebecca Ferguson, Sam Humphrey, Paul Sparks, Yahya Abdul-Mateen II, Cameron Seely, Austyn Johnson, Ellis Rubin, Skylar Dunn, Gayle Rankin
Biography/Drama/Musical - 105 min Reviewed by Charlie Juhl on 20 Dec 2017
Let it be known, I look forward to Hugh Jackman musicals over his Wolverine films, even the deeper ones like Logan. His Jean Valjean from Les Misérables and even the clumsy effort that was Australia the musical is more intriguing than chaff like the Wolverine spin-off in Japan and the Origins prequel. Jackman as P.T. Barnum emits a frenetic energy, which makes for a very enjoyable film during the song and dance numbers and is just enough to tide the audience over during the lackluster narrative. The Greatest Showman may be on the wincing side of tart for some, but considering I am nowhere near the musical genre’s biggest fan, these songs by Benj Pasek and Justin Paul are fun, memorable, and do far more credit to the film than the choppy, by the numbers story.
La La Land is the musical The Greatest Showman wants to be. The movie poster even screams it’s brought to you by the same producers! However, La La Land worked because its two halves, the songs and story, met in the middle. The Greatest Showman is lopsided with moving and believable songs acting as interludes between an eye-rolling and generic script. The structure is a close cousin to James Cagney’s Yankee Doodle Dandy - a biography charting the course of a dyed in the wool American icon from meager beginnings to national acclaim. Everybody knows the name Barnum from the modern circus , but The Greatest Showman functions as a surface-skimming history lesson letting us know P.T. was the son of immigrants, an ideas man with more courage in the sales pitch than common sense in the follow-through, and by featuring (or exploiting) a cast of physical oddities, he laid the frame for what we collectively think of when someone says, “the circus is coming to town.”
La La Land is the musical The Greatest Showman wants to be. The movie poster even screams it’s brought to you by the same producers! However, La La Land worked because its two halves, the songs and story, met in the middle. The Greatest Showman is lopsided with moving and believable songs acting as interludes between an eye-rolling and generic script. The structure is a close cousin to James Cagney’s Yankee Doodle Dandy - a biography charting the course of a dyed in the wool American icon from meager beginnings to national acclaim. Everybody knows the name Barnum from the modern circus , but The Greatest Showman functions as a surface-skimming history lesson letting us know P.T. was the son of immigrants, an ideas man with more courage in the sales pitch than common sense in the follow-through, and by featuring (or exploiting) a cast of physical oddities, he laid the frame for what we collectively think of when someone says, “the circus is coming to town.”
You shall be forgiven if you automatically compare Jackman’s Barnum to the aforementioned X-Men; those mutants are also society’s outcasts. Barnum exhibited the 19th century’s version of freaks and created a safe space for them. Professor Xavier employed his freaks as a paramilitary fighting force but also provided them sanctuary. Mid 19th-century America was a different world. A person was limited by their last name, the family they were born into, and their class. Young P.T. was trampled on; however, the screenwriters, Jenny Bicks and Bill Condon, portray the lad growing up not caring what people thought of him. He was not bound by the rules nor by the dress code. The rules of society did not apply to him and he celebrated that freedom in his early showcases of the ‘unusual’.
It takes a few cocktails and a dance number, but P.T. lures in a partner, and more importantly, an investor in Philip Carlyle (Zac Efron, We Are Your Friends). Philip grew up privileged and supported by wealth to pursue his pleasures. However, clearly unhappy, feeling caged, and losing sight of who he is, Philip literally runs away to the circus - a bold move costing him status and inheritance. The Greatest Showman’s love story conflict orbits Philip and a forbidden romance with the circus’s trapeze artist, Anne Wheeler (Zendaya). Anne is a person of color in 1850, a boundary frequently enforced by violence when it came to any progressive ideas about interracial couples. Philip is too busy breaking through personal barriers about not having to live within the limits imposed upon you by others to truly appreciate the gravity of his actions upon not only himself, but Anne.
The Greatest Showman’s strongest elements are these band of misfits coming together. As a unit, they realize they have a new power they never had before when they were alone, mocked, and shunned out in the streets. They are out of the shadows and believe in themselves, perhaps gaining a sense of pride for the first time in their lives after receiving the P.T. push. Barnum knew how to make something out of nothing, turned his setbacks into positives, and believed that what makes you different, makes you special. The film’s major themes spouting the power of imagination and following your dreams with a fearless abandon are a bit too on the nose, but hey, you’re in movie musical territory. Accept the rules and move on.
Concerning the project’s technical mastery and choreography, we assume Barnum would not want some staid, stale period piece. He would want cutting edge, fresh, new, an evolution. Director Michael Gracey certainly offers spectacle, a unique style, and a tribute that doesn’t really look like anything else out there. The singing is not recorded live ala Les Miséables because there is far too much sprinting and jumping during the production, but only diehard purists should have any problem at all with the recorded music. There is an intriguing, and very jaded, critic in the story, James Gordon Bennett (Paul Sparks, House of Cards), with whom Barnum maintains a long-running grudge match with. Bennett throttles Barnum’s shows in the paper and in polite society, and is even given credit for coining the whole affair, “the circus”. Barnum’s counter-attacks are quite witty - “a theater critic who cannot find joy in the theater; now who’s the fraud?”
Barnum’s public escapades inevitably impact his personal life and his saintly wife, Charity (Michelle Williams, Oz the Great and Powerful), who left her life of ease without a second thought chasing love instead. She fell for P.T. when he was broke, defeated, and without prospects. Shoved aside and taken for granted when P.T. vaults into what he always wanted, respect and esteem from the upper class, Charity gets some juicy one-liners like, “You don’t need everyone to love you, just a few good people.” Those few good people are his family and his cast of oddities, led by the Bearded Woman (Keala Settle). Settle scores the film’s most brilliant song, “This Is Me”, a song about courage in one’s individuality which arrives around the movie’s midpoint.
Unintentionally, The Greatest Showman also acts as a sendoff to America’s most famous circus, The Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus which closed its doors this year after 146 years in operation. The Greatest Show on Earth is no longer profitable in the 21st century and the persistent accusations of animal cruelty affects the audience more than it did a century and a half ago. But you don’t have to run away with the circus and suspend your credulity to appreciate The Greatest Showman as a film. It is semi-realistic. There really was this man who, like most immigrants, came from nothing but had a dream. Here is a story and songs celebrating a dreamer who broke out of his hamster-wheel existence, and warts and all, preached the limitless possibility of life - that’s pretty much what any of us could want from an escapist musical.
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