LAMEST SHOW ON EARTH
P.T. Barnum tale whitewashes his many faults
THE GREATEST SHOWMAN Underthesmalltop. Running time: 105 minutes. Rated PG (thematic elements, a brawl). Now playing.
THE bizarre message of “The Greatest Showman,” the new movie musical based on the life of famous trickster P.T. Barnum, is: Be yourself.
A family film starring Hugh Jackman, it concludes that freak shows such as the one at Barnum’s lower Manhattan museum were a “celebration of humanity” rather than horrible exploitation.
And like a Pyongyang, North Korea, history book, director Michael Gracey has polished away real events, ignoring Barnum’s dark past and the seediness of his 19th-century New York. The freak show looks more like a Cirque du Soleil Vegas spectacular than the Coney Island Circus Sideshow. And Barnum is re-envisioned as a devoted family man fit for PG audiences, instead of the sleazebag huckster who once proclaimed, “Nobody ever lost a dollar by underestimating the taste of the American public.”
The film follows Jackman’s downon-his-luck Barnum as he struggles to support his family — two daughters and a wife, Charity (Michelle Williams, who apparently got lost and wandered onto the wrong soundstage). The crafty showman finally becomes the toast of the town when his museum draws hordes eager to see the likes of “Siamese twins” Chang and Eng and 25-inch-tall Tom Thumb. A musical about Barnum isn’t a bad idea: Broadway’s 1980 “Barnum” was a hit. But the filmmakers needn’t whitewash the real story to make it. “Moulin Rouge!” for example — the 2001 musical “Showman” clearly wants to be — managed to romanticize that Parisian den of sin without ever suggesting that being a high-end escort is a noble profession. The preachy “Showman” argues that Barnum should be celebrated for bringing “freaks” like the bearded lady out of the shadows, but those characters are sketchily drawn. The choicest songs go to Jackman, Williams, Zac Efron (as a writer and partner on Barnum’s circus) and Rebecca Ferguson (as opera singer Jenny Lind), save for the rousing “This Is Me,” belted by Keala Settle’s bearded lady. For the most part, however, the pop songs from Benj Pasek and Justin Paul (“Dear Evan Hansen”) are haphazardly tacked onto this periodaccurate musical like some drunk’s game of pin the tail on the donkey. Among the film’s few joys is Efron, who enjoys a scandalous romance with trapeze artist Anne (Zendaya). A pity that this Barnum movie turns its leading man into Father Teresa.