The Greatest Showman
Even with all the energy and spectacle one might expect for a circus, The Greatest
Showman seems strangely vacant. While Hugh Jackman’s love of musicals occasionally rubs off on the screen, the end product seems as phony as a “Feejee Mermaid.”
That amusingly dubious attraction was actually a mummified monkey whose torso had been sewn into a fish’s tail. Similarly, freshman director Michael Gracey and screenwriters Jenny Bicks and Bill Condon make monkeys of viewers by introducing promising plot threads that lead nowhere.
Because the story is a musical, it’s fair to forgive Gracey and others for departing from what P.T. Barnum actually did. After all, Barnum himself boasted in his various autobiographies how he hoodwinked backers into supporting some of his presentations. That said, Bicks and Condon don’t seem to know when to tell the truth or print the legend.
As in real life, Barnum (Jackman) was the son of tailor and lost his father at an early age. The movie doesn’t show that he actually had to support his mother and siblings (who aren’t depicted) through a series of odd jobs until he became an exhibitor and a circus magnate.
Barnum’s long first marriage to Charity Hallett (Michelle Williams) plays as simply loving and supporting and doesn’t have much in the way of interaction or chemistry. Charity simply seems to be along for the ride instead of an active participant. It’s troubling that the accomplished Williams was given so little to do.
Perhaps sensing that she and Jackman have an oil and water chemistry, there’s a subplot involving Barnum’s patrician business partner Phillip Carlyle (Zac Efron) and a black trapeze artist named Anne Wheeler (Zendaya, who has Arkansas roots). Gracey and the screenwriters seem to believe that having an attractive couple occasionally kiss and dance involving circus stunts is enough to fill the running time. Perhaps it would be if the songs they bellow at each other were any good. While the posters announce that the lyricists from La La Land, Benj Pasek and Justin Paul, are behind the new film, two other key contributors, writer-director Damien Chazelle and composer Justin Hurwitz aren’t involved.
Gracey has made a great looking film, but he lacks Chazelle’s audacious and imaginative stagings. Pasek and Paul still come up with clever phrasings, but their words can’t make up for the flaccid, redundant melodies John Debney and Joseph Trapanese have placed under their words. The mid-tempo pop songs sound annoyingly like the ones that preceded them and are indistinguishable.
Hurwitz’s range and creativity are really missed here.
The deficiency really becomes noticeable in the film’s depiction of singer Jenny Lind (Rebecca Ferguson) whose work under Barnum’s promotion brought the huckster some legitimacy. Why depict her if you’re not going to have songs that pay tribute to her legendary gifts?
Actually, Gracey and company could have made a better film by simply concentrating on one of Barnum’s professional relationships or achievements. In 1853, his museum presented a play of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s harrowing anti-slavery novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin and was one of many things that led to the Confederate army of Manhattan’s attempt burn the building down in 1864.
In addition, many of the people he promoted to fame barely register. Conjoined twins Chang and Eng became world famous as the Siamese Twins, but they simply occupy the corner of the screen. Barnum’s embrace of misfits could have made for a powerful story, but they take a back seat to the lifeless love stories.
Jackman’s enthusiasm for musical theater resonates. It’s too bad there’s more humbug than wonder here.