THE GREATEST SHOWMAN

Whatever your tolerance for the modern musical, there’s no doubting the quality delivered by this UHD Blu-ray.

The movie musical is a persistent form, and even today is sometimes successful. Witness the success of La La Land a couple of years ago. Like that movie, The Greatest Showman is an original movie musical. That is, the movie was written entirely for screen. It’s not adapted from the stage.

And it’s a biopic, after a fashion. Hugh Jackman plays P.T. Barnum, the mid-19th century American entertainment entrepreneur. Barnum’s name lived on, until recently, most prominently in the Barnum and Bailey circuses. As a real person, he was a mixed bag. The real Barnum started his show-biz career by purchasing and exhibiting an elderly female slave, implausibly claiming she had been a wet nurse to George Washington (to justify which he had to claim that she was 160 years old). When she died, he charged 50 cents each of the 1500 spectators to her autopsy.

Yet 20 years later, still some years before the Civil War, he left the Democratic Party over the issue of slavery and joined the then-new antislavery Republican Party. Later, as a politician, he spoke stirringly in favour of the anti-slavery Constitutional amendment.

This biopic whizzes through his early life,

meeting his wife, marrying her and fathering two children, all in one song. It bears little to no relationship to his real life. The meat of the movie, then, is his establishment of what would become his “circus”, along with his family relationship.

Jackson delivers the epitome of the lovable rogue in his Barnum. He’s irrepressibly enthusiastic, a dynamo. The timeline is compressed — his two daughters don’t age at all, but then neither is their seven-year age spread apparent.

In this movie, Barnum’s business success comes when he decides to round up ‘unique’ people for his circus. There is the bearded lady, the ‘world’s heaviest man’, the ‘world’s tallest man’ and of course a little person, played by the Australian actor Sam Humphrey. (The movie is directed by Australian Michael Gracey, his debut, apparently at Jackman’s request.)

The themes are inclusion and anti-elitism. Critics seem to have felt them to be heavyhanded, but I like a strong dose of uplift. So, apparently, do audiences. The movie collected more than US$400 million at the box office.

That wouldn’t have happened without some good music and performances, with first-class choreography. The voice talent was strong. Jackman started life in (and has continued practising) musical theatre, and it shows. He’s the real thing, not just an actor drilled in it for one job. He’s ably supported by Zac Efron, Zendaya and several others. The music is in the standard style of recent Broadway musicals, with a decent Hamiltonian infusion.

Big picture

This movie came to us on Ultra-HD in a single-disc box. In picture and in sound it is fully reference standard. As the film starts, there’s an old film-based 20th Century Fox logo which looks like it was lifted from a 1970s film print. Its sound seems to be Academy Standard, bandwidth-limited as used through the 1940s and early 1950s.

That only lasts for a few seconds, and is clearly a call-back to earlier times (although not really the 1850s!). It runs instantly into the massed foot-stomp bass beat and choir of the opening song.

The movie was shot on Arri Alexa hardware, apparently in ARRIRAW 3.4K and 6.5K. The processing is at 4K (presumably 4096 wide rather than 3840). Much of the photography is high contrast,

with deep wide stages and bright highlights. The detail in the shadows is first-class. Jackman’s dark suit while showing Michelle Williams around his new museum is wonderfully shaded, despite being the deepest of blue-greys. HDR does its stuff here, and on OLED this looks amazing.

The clarity is, in fact, too good in parts. In this movie Barnum’s animals appear only rarely, and when they do they are all too obviously CGI. Thankfully the appearance of the lions at the end is very brief.

The video bit-rate ran for the most part between around 50Mbps to 80Mbps, sometimes pushing up to just short of 100Mbps.

Sound spectacular

Good as the picture is, the sound is even better. The main audio selection is Dolby Atmos, with a two-channel DTS-HD Master Audio presentation provided for those who prefer their musicals in stereo. The Atmos is the original sound. Indeed, it’s the only audio format acknowledged at the end of the film.

Clearly the mix was performed by someone who loves the possibilities available with Atmos. There’s none of this grudging use of a bit of surround here or there. The movie is fully immersive from end to end, including through the song performances. Since there’s a lot going on in those, the spreading of the apparent sources of sound over a hemispherical ‘sound stage’ provides superb clarity for everything.

Extras

Despite the lack of a second disc, there are some extras. ‘Music Machine’ lets you play each of the 15 songs separately or in one straight collection. This hooks into the movie stream, providing access to all the different audio languages (other than the descriptive audio and commentary). Each song is presented as a separate title, with the ‘Play All’ option amounting to 56 minutes. The regular subtitles aren’t available, but instead there’s an optional ‘Sing-along’ subtitle, which uses a larger coloured font and highlights the progress of each song phrase.

There’s also a ‘Sing-along’ version of the movie. This is identical to regular playback, except that the audio options are the same as ‘Music Machine’ and the only subtitle is the ‘Sing-along’ one, again as per ‘Music Machine’. I imagine the twin-disc version has some featurettes on the accompanying BD.