"The Greatest Showman": review

Before there was ever an Island of Misfit Toys, there was PT Barnum's circus.  2017's "The Greatest Showman" is a cinematic musical starring Hugh Jackman as the indefatigable Barnum himself.  Michelle Williams is Barnum's long-suffering wife Charity; Zac Efron is Barnum's business partner Phillip Carlyle; Zendaya is the trapeze artist (and Carlyle's love interest) Anne Wheeler; finally, Rebecca Ferguson is Swedish singing talent Jenny Lind.

This movie is both a musical and a biopic, and since we all know biopics often tend to be as much fictions as fact, it's safe to say that the film isn't too concerned with the truth.  That may be apropos in this case:  PT Barnum had a reputation as a fraud and a shyster; he might have approved of a biopic that distorted his life and presented it as larger than life.  The basic plot follows Barnum from his boyhood days to the moment he has his epiphany and realizes his circus doesn't need to be housed in a brick-and-mortar building, but should instead become a traveling tent show.  (In reality, Barnum's circus didn't come to life until the man was 60—just one of the many liberties taken with the details.)

As a boy, Phineas Taylor Barnum had a sense of humor, a sense of adventure, and a wild imagination.  We see him joking with his young neighbor Charity, who adores his wit and laughs at his jokes, even if it means getting in trouble for spitting out her tea.  Charity's straitlaced, patrician parents look down their noses at young PT and his father, a working-class tailor. Eventually, when PT is old enough, he asks for Charity's hand in marriage, and they move to New York City, where they start a family and have two daughters, Caroline and Helen (Austyn Johnson and Cameron Seely, respectively).  PT is unable to find and keep decent work; money troubles plague the early years of his marriage.  There's a brief flashback in which a young PT, starving on the streets after his father's early death, receives an apple from a kind stranger with a deformed face; the experience remains with PT and blossoms into something big later on.  PT initially thinks he should establish a museum; he does so, but almost no one visits, and his daughters tell him he needs to have fewer "dead things" and more living, sensational items to show off.  A light bulb goes off in PT's head, and he begins trolling New York for freaks and acrobats.  Many appear—meekly at first because they've lived under the pall of societal hatred and ridicule—but Barnum convinces them that they can put on a show and gain respect thereby.

This proves to be only half correct:  Barnum's show is, initially, a great success, but the haters begin to arrive in droves, mocking the circus freaks (as well as the black members of the troupe, who may as well have been circus freaks themselves, given the ubiquitous racism of the period) and threatening to run everyone out of town.  Meanwhile, Barnum's young, white partner Phillip Carlyle falls in love with the beautiful Anne Wheeler, who is black; Carlyle's parents view the interracial romance with disgust, and Phillip does what he can to make up for his parents' prejudice.  Anne, for her part, sees the problem as much bigger than just Phillip's parents, and she has a point.  

The haters continue to hate, but Barnum's show continues to turn a profit, and he's finally able to move his wife and daughter into a mansion down the street from Charity's parents.  The move is partly to spite the in-laws who looked down on PT, but it's also to please his wife, who has fond memories of the mansion from years ago, when she was a little girl, and the mansion had been abandoned.  But, unsatisfied with his success, Barnum pines for legitimacy:  he's known as someone who is openly a fake and a con man, drawing in crowds and exposing them to trickery and illusion, and he wants to be known for something real.  During a visit to England to meet the Queen, Barnum makes the acquaintance of "the Swedish Nightingale" Jenny Lind, who is an immensely popular singer in Europe.  He tempts her away from her Europe tours with the promise of big money in the States; the film implies that Barnum and Lind engage in a naughtily flirtatious relationship:  like Charity, Jenny is charmed by PT's wild imagination, and PT is hypnotized by Jenny's genuinely stupendous talent.

The rest of the movie involves a plunge into despair as Barnum loses Jenny, the haters burn down Barnum's building in New York City, and Barnum nearly loses his family when a photo of Lind impulsively kissing him hits the newspapers and angers Barnum's wife.  And then, when all seems lost, a new thing arises from the ashes, and the future is bright once more.

I admit I'm not much of a musicals kind of guy, but occasionally, I'll sit through a musical and be touched, maybe even transported.  I enjoyed (and maybe even cried at) a live performance of "The Phantom of the Opera" at the Kennedy Center years ago.  "The Sound of Music" has been a much-viewed and re-viewed classic in my family (its director, Robert Wise, also directed "Star Trek: The Motion Picture").  I absolutely loved Baz Luhrmann's zany, kaleidoscopic "Moulin Rouge" when it came out years ago.  So it's not as though I'm completely impervious to a musical's charm... but it has to be a good musical.

I'm not sure "The Greatest Showman" was that musical.  Yes, there were brief moments that touched me.  Yes, there were themes I could sympathize with, such as the idea of accepting the marginals among us, whether they be bearded ladies, "dog boys" stricken with hirsutism, conjoined twins (Chang and Eng make a brief appearance as part of Barnum's "menagerie"), freakishly tall and freakishly small human beings, or folks who have the misfortune of being black in a pre-Civil War society.  Yes, the talent on display was impressive, and the acting was generally fine.

But the movie has problems.  First, there's the matter of how the film handles PT's shysterism.  Much of his chicanery is merely implied; we don't see him shamelessly hawking fake mysteries or "mermaid skeletons" the way the real Barnum did.  (The real Barnum's most morally repulsive act may have been when he charged money for people to witness the gruesome autopsy of a black woman named Joice Heth, who was supposedly the 161-year-old nanny of George Washington.  In truth, Heth died around the age of 80, and Barnum actually admitted that Heth's age was half of what had been advertised... but he admitted this during the autopsy, when he knew his audience would be more transfixed by the gore than by the admission of his lie.  Wikipedia notes that Barnum had forced Heth to work 10-to-12-hour days while she was in her 80s.  The inclusion of this horrific deed might have made "The Greatest Showman" a much less upbeat musical.)  More confusingly, the movie emphasizes the idea that Barnum's ensemble of freaks and marginals were legitimate talents—not fakes at all.  The trapeze artists were actually good at what they did.  The singers and dancers and knife-throwers and acrobats were, in fact, adept at their work.  The freaks were genuine products of biological conditions, and when singer Jenny Lind came on board, she proved to be nothing short of the real thing.  So while I had done a bit of research into the real PT Barnum's life and had discovered on my own that he had, in fact, been quite the trickster and con artist, the movie merely claims he is a fake while showing us a man who puts on a bona fide show for the entertainment-hungry masses.

The movie also contained a few blatantly unresolved issues, of which I'll mention only the most glaring example:  that of PT Barnum's marginalization of his own troupe because he was so enamored of Jenny Lind.  The movie shows us that Barnum becomes so enthralled by the idea of legitimate talent that he dismisses his faithful troupe as nothing more than fakes themselves.  There's a sad moment in the film in which Barnum literally shuts the door on all of his performers except Jenny, excluding them from the posh party he's at.  The troupe mopes in sad silence before breaking out into a song about accepting oneself.  But does anything result from this conflict?  No.  Later in the film, Barnum has lost Jenny, and the troupe has seemingly forgiven him, knowing Barnum to be the victim of his own capricious whims.  I think the screenwriters missed a huge opportunity to explore a conflict that could have developed both Barnum's character and the individual characters of the troupe.  The conflict went unexplored because, I guess, it was more important to propel the plot forward.

And while the performances were generally good, I'm afraid I have to single out Michelle Williams for looking rather uncomfortable in a musical.  I'm not sure whether she sang her own songs (Rebecca Ferguson got overdubbed, and so did several other characters), but Williams never resonated with me.  She didn't seem to have much chemistry with Hugh Jackman, and during the moments when she was supposed to be dancing happily on a rooftop, she often looked as if she wanted to be somewhere else.  Now, I've sung Williams's praises before (see my review of "Manchester by the Sea," where I thought she was incredible), and I would never disparage her acting talent, but I just don't think that she meshed well with this film as a whole.  Every scene in which she appeared served to push me, just a bit, out of the film.  Her character, Charity, is supposed to be a sunny, optimistic person who gradually becomes disappointed with some of her husband's life-choices, but I don't think Michelle Williams is wired to play overly sunny characters:  she's more at home with quietly sad, brooding roles in which she labors under dark clouds.

Hugh Jackman, by contrast, has a deep background in stage musicals, so he's on his home turf here, never once evoking Logan the Wolverine.  Zendaya, too, is already a singer/dancer, and so is Zac Efron ("High School Musical").  All three actors are perfectly at home in a musical setting, and it shows.  The other performers in Barnum's troupe also do yeoman's work, even if they don't enjoy the same amount of screen time as the principals.

And this brings me to the film's greatest problem:  not the performers, but rather the music itself.  Remember the musicals I listed above?  The thing they all have in common is their memorable tunes.  Nothing in "The Greatest Showman" strikes me as anywhere near as memorable as any song from the aforementioned musicals.  And that's unfortunate because the performers do sing and dance their hearts out.  The movie's production values are quite good (except maybe for the CGI circus animals that appear at points throughout the film), and the energy level of the film is undeniably high.  I suppose I should also give the biopic-musical credit for not completely sanitizing PT Barnum's life:  the movie makes clear that the man was often ruled by base motives, that he wasn't always moored to reality, and that family did not always come first for him.  That said, biographical accuracy or not, the music was still a disappointment:  it just wasn't all that catchy.  Maybe a rewatch is in order, but to be honest, I'm not particularly motivated to spend more time with Mr. Barnum and Company.

As I mentioned above, biopics often lose something in the accuracy/factuality department.  This is even more of a problem when the biopic is also a musical:  musicals strain reality through a poetical filter that sometimes captures certain truths while letting other—arguably more important—truths pass right through.  If you're a fan of musicals, and if you buy into Barnum's sometimes manic optimism, then "The Greatest Showman" might be for you.  If, on the other hand, you're not normally into musicals, and you have somewhat high standards for both the music you do listen to and the story plots you experience, then "The Greatest Showman" will definitely not be worth your while.