directed by Michael Gracey
starring Hugh Jackman, Michelle Williams, Zac Efron, Zendaya
I'll say it again: I love musicals. I like watching talented people cobble together a full performance of story, song, and dance, using all of their narrative, vocal, and physical skills. I love being transported into a fully fleshed-out fantasy world. I want to be able to examine the performance, watch it from all angles, get an immersive experience.
Unfortunately many of today's musicals are so determined to break away from the older, classic Hollywood movie musicals and serve an apparently attention-deficit-disordered audience that they now offer style over substance, speed over accuracy, flash over form. I feel cheated out of a full experience by a number of now-common devices: slap dash, amateurish, or rushed storytelling; lightning-fast editing and multiple cross cuts that don't allow me to savor the fine points of choreography or even the actors' faces; simple songs voiced by unremarkable singers with insistent, multi-voiced choruses not sung with artistic intent but flung through the speakers like so many handfuls of pop-music confetti. Maybe this is because today's movie musicals seem to be targeted primarily at 14-year-old girls with the attention spans of butterfly moths and artistic discernment honed by years of playing videogames, watching animated cartoons, and wearing sequinned princess costumes.
Even the choreography now is moving away from the rigors and finesse of trailblazers like Bob Fosse, Michael Kidd, and Hermes Pan to a style that's a cross between high school cheerleading, square-dance hootenannies, and the most elementary B-boying. You should know that there is quite a bit of stomping and pointing in this film. So much stomping, in fact, that I came to see it as the characters' insistence that they have a right to exist, a right to pursue whatever goals they set for themselves, and a right to present this modest entertainment as the height of artistic excellence.
This is a major reason why The Greatest Showman was such a disappointment. There is a whole lot of style over substance in this film, perhaps the fault of first-time director Gracey, who comes to the project after directing commercials in Australia. The sets and the costumes, the makeup and the visual effects are absolutely stunning. But like a newborn who fails to adapt to breastfeeding, I never properly latched on to this glittering tale of the rags to riches story of Phineas T. Barnum. Viewers are rushed and bullied into accepting its parameters and premise with little time to orient themselves within the story.
What's more, while I find Hugh Jackman an attractive and able performer, in all honesty, his voice is not that special. It's not transporting, sonorous, inspiring, or even imbued with personality. His singing voice is simply serviceable. Perhaps this is a function of the songs, which are robust and cleverly composed and produced to the outer limits of modern studio technocraft, but, being entirely contemporary and anachronistic to the time period in which the story takes place, are bombastic and forgettable. The most unique and interesting voice in the entire film belongs to a woman with a full beard and mustache (Keala Settle in full makeup), but her quivering earnestness and bouncing bosoms almost turn her into a cartoon laughing stock (indeed, it's hard not to think that she is mere seconds from an explosive costume malfunction during her energetic dance routines).
So let's talk about the cast of characters. PT Barnum's wife (Michelle Williams with her usual Mona Lisa smile) and daughters are as cute as cute can be. We get to see them, get to know them as adorable, unendingly supportive, and humanizing elements for the character of Barnum himself, whose motivations (get even with his rich father in law, exploit the downtrodden both inside and outside his tent) are entirely suspect. The cast of misfits, oddities, and physically challenged performers Barnum drafts into his service get embarrassingly short shrift. For most, other than Tom Thumb, we barely even learn their names, histories or the true nature of their gifts or get to enjoy their acts. Former Disney star Zendaya is cast as a beautiful young aerialist, and she gets to emote and sing, but her character is only barely sketched out. In her star-crossed romance with Barnum partner Philip Carlyle (Zac Efron), I wasn't sure if the impediment to their happy future was her perceived undesirable status as a circus freak or a person of color or both. And the whole Jenny Lind (Rebecca Ferguson) storyline, though historically apt, failed in one respect: Lind was the Swedish Nightingale of that era, but the songs she was given to sing in the movie did little -- in my estimation -- to earn her that title. Further, for a film mostly set in New York City -- Barnum's American Museum was located in the Wall Street area -- the exterior sets seem to resemble some fantasy metropolis in a foreign land.
I'm not even going to get into the discussion of the real P.T. Barnum's exploitation and abuse of people of color, the physically and mentally challenged, and even the wildlife he retained in his museum and live shows. You can read about that here. Only rarely do film entertainments, least of all musicals, adhere to the facts of their subjects.
This is one of the very few instances in a film where I feel that a character needed to be designated as a narrator -- and I'm not really a big fan of narrators. Think of The Age of Innocence, how the unseen narrator was able to put a lot of the story, and the feelings of the characters, into context. Granted, the narration was adapted straight from Edith Wharton's novel. But if Tom Thumb, or even Zendaya's aerialist partner, had told the story of Barnum through their eyes, explaining his rise and fall and why the performers came to feel like family (at least in this telling), it would have enhanced the story significantly, as would a static camera during the large production numbers.
I actually enjoyed the music of The Greatest Showman, and I appreciate the effort and talent it took to produce this film. But as a whole, it left me unmoved. And that's OK. It seems entirely fitting that a big screen musical about a razzle-dazzle showman who said "There's a sucker born every minute" should be at the center of this piece of cotton candy fluff.
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