Skip to main content

The Greatest Showman is Insubstantial but Spectacular


Has anyone noticed it’s become Hollywood tradition in recent years to put out a musical around Christmas. Whether it be something original or a long-awaited adaptation of a Broadway hit, we’ve been getting them just about annually since 2012. This years’ serving is The Greatest Showman, the debut film from director Michael Gracey, based on the story of P.T. Barnum and how he came to create the recently deceased Barnum & Bailey Circus. It’s a movie that for all its pomp and scale, is just spectacle -but damn, what a spectacle!
Phineas Taylor Barnum (Hugh Jackman) has risen from meagre beginnings as the son of a tailor to marry his wealthy love Charity (Michelle Williams). With ambition to provide a comfortable life for his family and a number of failed jobs behind him, he takes a risky venture to open a wax museum. After it fails to make money however, he latches onto the idea of turning it into a show of human curiosities, recruiting a number of acts including a bearded lady, Siamese twins, and a dwarf. As the show succeeds however, Barnum’s higher aims come into conflict with what he set out to do.
By far the weakest aspect of this movie is the story, which is really shallow and clichéd. It’s every arc about someone striving for more only to realize what’s really important that’s been a staple of movies for decades. The early parts of the movie especially are preoccupied with whimsy and fluff, and the script is generally not very strong. It’s also a shame that few of the characters are realized, as while there’s an emphatic theme on the plight of the socially outcast “curiosities”, only a couple of them have any significant part in the story. It’s not good when the cast of Tod Browning’s Freaks (which came out in 1932) are more developed and well-rounded than these characters. It doesn’t really do justice to the idea of shining a light on these people when most of them are in the background, with more attention given over to Barnum’s family or his partner Philip Carlyle (Zac Efron). I wouldn’t mind this as much if it weren’t obvious in a number of scenes how much historical revisionism was taking place. I don’t know a lot about Barnum, but I can certainly spot Hollywood tropes; and while I like that the film at least addressed his negative character traits, his selfishness, and gave an understandable reason for them, he still feels like a heavily polished twenty-first century impression of the actual Barnum.
In spite of that, Hugh Jackman gives a great performance, demonstrating perfect casting, as he’s arguably one of the greatest showmen today. It’s not on par with Les Mis or Logan, but he plays every emotion well and is clearly thoroughly engaged with the part. Michelle Williams is really good as his partner, despite the comically obvious ten year age gap between two characters meant to be the same age. Zac Efron is quite good in his first musical since his days at the Disney Channel, working well off of his love interest, Zendaya, playing a trapeze artist acrobat. Rebecca Ferguson plays Jenny Lind, the Swedish singer who catches Barnum’s eye, and Keala Settle is pretty formidable as the bearded lady. Also, Paul Sparks has a good supporting role as James Bennett, a critic for the New York Herald, adversary of Barnum, and supposedly the coiner of the word ‘circus’ for Barnum’s show.
But what really saves The Greatest Showman are its musical numbers. The songs are written by Pasek and Paul, the same songwriters behind La La Land, and while none of these have quite the power of those songs, they’re really well done. The diversity anthem “This is Me” is easily the most catchy, the most driven, the one used in the trailers and likely the big Oscar contender; but “A Million Dreams” is also a stand-out. They’re written in a very bombastic Broadway style and contemporary, rather than ascribing to the period or a particular theme. The one time this hurts the film is the song “Never Enough” which is presented unambiguously as a song taking place in-story and thus entirely out of place in the nineteenth century. But it’s still sung and presented nicely, like all of them. In fact the productions of a lot of these songs are visually marvellous. For a rookie, Gracey really knows how to stage musical numbers with great choreography and unbridled energy. In the fast-paced ones like “The Greatest Show” and “Come Alive” there’s so much going on and so much genuine joy. And in this it does feel like a heartfelt celebration of the circus, bad CG animals aside. Even the cinematography stands out in many of these sequences, conveying more effectively the meanings in the songs. “This is Me” is a good example of this, as is one particular technical trick in the reprise of “Never Enough”.
The Greatest Showman is a movie that’s actually worth sitting through its often crap plot to get to each next musical sequence. Spectacle certainly isn’t everything, as the similar film The Greatest Show on Earth proved, but this is a movie that does it so well and with such genuine care from the cast and crew that I can’t help but like it at least a little.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Strange History of the American Spoof Movie

Parody movies have been around for a lot longer than we tend to think of them. Even from the earliest days of Hollywood there were movies meant to satirize a particular subject or genre. In the silent era, Buster Keaton was responsible for a few. And in the early sound era, almost as soon as the monster pictures took off did you see comic versions of them -Abbott and Costello hosting a few. But parody movies tended to be subtle for most of cinema history, or parody came in conjunction with another goal of the comedy. It really wasn’t until the 1980s and 90s that it took off and became popularly understood. And there is perhaps a line to be drawn to the counterculture comedy explosion that began in the 1970s through avenues like  Saturday Night Live , which frequently parodied from even its earliest years popular movies and cultural properties of the time. But that is still a way’s back. To my generation though, ‘parody movie’ is perhaps a less known term than the more blunt ‘s...
Post a Comment
Read more

A Stylish and Charmingly Reinvented David Copperfield

The Personal History, Adventures, Experience and Observation of David Copperfield the Younger of Blunderstone Rookery (Which He Never Meant to Publish on Any Account)  is the most important book Charles Dickens ever wrote. It is not the most famous or influential by any means (that would of course be A Christmas Carol ), but it is the book that is the purest expression of the authors’ style, identity, and worldview. It is his most personal work, semi-autobiographical in its story of the chronology from infancy to adulthood of a character who overcomes great loss and hardships to find a fulfilling life as a writer. To read David Copperfield  is to understand Dickens himself. Armando Iannucci knew this when he decided to make a new adaptation of the novel for a twenty-first century audience. He also knew that Dickens adaptations are ubiquitous at this point. Films are a bit rarer, but every few years a new television adaptation rears its head to keep the authors’ unique world an...
Post a Comment
Read more

Notes on the Title Cards of The Lord of the Rings

It might be sacrilege for one who both considers The Lord of the Rings  trilogy to be one of the greatest triumphs of cinema and has been an avid lover of the films since adolescence, to declare that the original theatrical cuts of the films are better than the much beloved extended editions. Easily it’s my most controversial opinion regarding these movies. Don’t get me wrong, I do like the extended editions quite a lot, especially as someone who just enjoys spending time in that universe. They flesh it out more, add extra flavour, and in increasing the length by about an hour really emphasize the epic quality of these films. But I find that the original cuts are generally more cleanly paced, more seamlessly edited, and much more accessible to audiences. All the stuff there is to love about The Lord of the Rings  is there in the original versions, the plethora of new and extended scenes merely add to that for fans. And of those, they fall into three camps for me: 1....
1 comment
Read more