Biopic of PT Barnum is surprisingly flat
THE GREATEST SHOWMAN Direction: Michael Gracey Actors: Hugh Jackman, Michelle Williams
Rating:
This all-singing, all-swinging soap opera charts the rags-toriches-to-dubious redemption story of the 19thcentury show business impresario, PT Barnum (played by the ever-versatile Hugh Jackman). From his humble beginnings as a freak show producer to his emergence as a celebrity circus magnate, The Greatest Showman traces the flashy hoopla of life under the Big Top. The film is peppered with original songs by Benj Pasek and Justin Paul, the Oscar-winning lyricist duo behind last year’s La La Land, but the pace is slow, especially at the start.
The film opens with clichéd scenes showing Barnum’s childhood of penury and his subsequent marriage to a woman (Michelle Williams) from a snooty family. Their domestic scenes are sappy to the point of exhaustion. It’s only when he starts to showcase the outcasts of society — a bearded woman (Keala Settle), ‘General’ Tom Thumb (Sam Humphrey) and a pair of Siamese twins — that the story starts to go somewhere. The screenplay skims over the entrepreneur’s exploitation of the core group he nicknamed ‘The Oddities’, preferring instead to focus on the inter-racial romance between his business partner (Zac Efron) and a trapeze artist (Zendaya).
There isn’t much of a plot. First-time feature filmmaker and former music-video whiz Michael Gracey seems content to merely herd a bunch of montage sequences together.
Thankfully, a couple of barnstorming melodies — chief among them, ‘This is me’, performed with great gusto by the Oddities troupe — do raise the roof.
Otherwise, for a biopic that purports to celebrate humanity in all its diversity, The Greatest Showman is surprisingly flat.