The Greatest Showman

In every area of human endeavor, there’s a spectrum of quality. Whether you are a plumber, an architect, a baseball player, a teacher, a parent, or a professional competitive basket weaver, there’s that small number of life changers, a handful of really memorable good ones, and then a huge heap of “Yay” to “Meh.” It’s true with chefs, painters, accountants, and it’s certainly true of movies.

Hugh Jackman’s latest vehicle, the P.T. Barnum biopic musical, The Greatest Showman, is not a life-changer. It will probably not end up in the same pantheon as White Christmas, The Wizard of Oz, Oklahoma, or Fiddler on the Roof. This is not to say that it’s bad; it just doesn’t belong in that top layer of quality.

 

Hugh Jackman plays Phineas Barnum, the poor son of a tailor, who uses his drive, imagination, and not just a little flim flam to make himself a fortune as a purveyor of oddities, curiosities, and freaks. Michelle Williams plays his unfailingly supportive wife, Charity, and the two raise their superhumanly cute young daughters next to the bearded lady, General Tom Thumb, acrobats, and trapeze artists.

It’s a rags-to-riches story in which Barnum briefly loses his way as he is tempted by Jenny Lind, the Swedish opera singer he brings to the states in a bid for respectability, but ultimately  comes through for his family, his circus friends, and his own vision of himself.

The Greatest Showman is strongest when it fully embraces being a musical. There is some inventive choreography and staging. As a young Barnum is down on his luck, he sings to his wife and daughters on the roof of their tenement. As he dances with his wife and lifts her, all the sheets on the laundry line billow simultaneously at exactly the same moment. It’s a small detail but lovely, the kind of things that usually only happens in musicals. The songs are catchy and enjoyable, but they also seem to be ready-made for the radio rather than a musical. The very general lyrics are about being yourself and believing in your dreams and that sort of thing. They’re enjoyable but too general to really resonate and last.

The Greatest Showman’s biggest problem is its lack of a sense of real history. Barnum was, of course, a real person, an important, complicated figure during one of the most influential and turbulent periods in U.S. history. The film is glossy in both good and bad ways. Visually, it’s rich, composed, and slick. Historically, it glosses over Barnum as a man as well as major events like, for instance, the Civil War. I have no problem with a film based on true events streamlining things for the sake of telling a story. But it’s hard to take seriously a film that completely ignores the fact that one of Barnum’s most prominent oddities was a blind, disabled slave named Joice Heth who he promoted as the 161 year old nurse of George Washington and how, when she died, Barnum paid for a public autopsy of the poor woman to take place in front of 1500 people so he could supposedly verify her age. There are no public autopsies in the film and Barnum is touted as an agent of diversity rather than as a slave owner. The Greatest Showman simplifies the actual story to the point where it’s not really the same story. 

If you can overlook its almost complete lack of historical grounding, The Greatest Showman is enjoyable. Hugh Jackman is an immensely charismatic performer, and Michelle Williams, while underused, has a maturity that grounds the two of them as a couple. The film is not one of the greats, but there are some ecstatic moments of song, dance, cinematography, and editing that make it worth watching.