The Greatest Showman

"Trust me, they don't know it yet, but they're going to love you."

Filmology Rating: 2.5 out of 4

While I have always loved the movie musical after La La Land, I became obsessed with the genre and found that I could never get over the glitz and glamour of the pure magic onscreen.  I went on a musical journey that lead me to films like Dreamgirls, High Society, and The Umbrellas of Cherbourg to name just a few; and I left every film with a song in my heart and a spirit full of life.  Great movie musicals should always make us feel like we are intoxicated with life and give us a song in our heart and a soul in our step.  

P.T. Barnum, played by Hugh Jackman, is struggling with his life, feeling that he is a failure since he cannot provide the life he promised for his wife, played by Michelle Williams, and their two children.  Barnum struggles with the humdrum of life but realizes that he can con his way into the higher society life when he opens a show that features the oddities of life.   

Within moments of the film starting I found my heart sinking, the film felt like it was being ripped from Baz Luhrman’s “Red Curtain Trilogy.”  While I love Luhrman’s trilogy and find it to be one of the most inventive and stylistic trilogies to hit the silver screen, that doesn’t mean that I want to see films try to replicate the style of it.  Luhrman himself tried to replicate the success he had with The Great Gatsby and that film was a bombastic film that missed the nuance themes of the classic Fitzgerald novel.  Perhaps I’m giving too much credit to Luhrman for the postmodernism of The Greatest Showman and the true inspiration is “Hamilton” by Lin-Manuel Miranda but since I have yet to see the show or listen to the music I feel that I cannot fully commit to that statement.  The entire point that I’m attempting to make is that I was terrified that The Greatest Showman would feel like a copycat film, but the moment that you get a clear view of Hugh Jackman you realize that you are in capable hands.  

Hugh Jackman has always been one of the most charming men in Hollywood, he has this charismatic hypnotic charm that makes him always compelling and engaging to watch even in misguided films like X-Men Origins: Wolverine and Les Misérables.  I could go on ad nauseam about how talented Jackman is but just by watching how gracefully he glides across the frame to choreography that is choreographed spectacularly by Ashley Allen and watching the chemistry that he has with Zac Efron; you can tell that you are watching the work of a true thespian who has never seemed to have gotten the credit he deserves, but hopefully he will one day win his golden statue.  The Greatest Showman seems to only work then Jackman is on the screen and everytime he is absent you are left longing for him to return.  

I’ve been struggling with how I feel about the songs by Benj Pasek and Justin Paul.  Pasek and Paul were the lyricists behind La La Land and they also won the 2017 Tony Awards for Best Original Score and Best Musical for “Dear Evan Hansen” so they clearly have an enormous amount of talent and some of that is shown off in The Greatest Showman.  I walked out of the film wanting to listening to “Come Alive” and “This is Me” on constant repeat while I was also left wondering why the film felt the desire to sell me pop songs that felt like they were included in the film for the sole purpose of selling singles for the film, since the general populous has seemed to have shunned musicals since the golden years of Hollywood.  The songs that felt completely out of place in the film are “Never Enough” and “Tightrope” which felt like they were crafted for Adele or Celine Dion; not to say anything negative about those artists but they aren’t the type of artists who create songs that usually belong in a musical.  Not only do the songs feel like they were written for a completely different audience than the ones that usually go to musicals but the film nearly comes to a complete halt and the film was struggling desperately to keep my attention.   

Like most cinephiles, the film that I kept thinking about while watching The Greatest Showman was the 1932 film Freaks.  We live in an age where people are being tormented because of their gender, sexual preference, or simply because of the way they look and they need a film to rally around that accepts them as they are in a glorious way rather than the terror that comes with the phrase “One of us.” The tone that is set during the number “From Now On” is rather uplifting when looking at in the bubble of this film, that these people who have been considered outcasts of society for years are given a place to live and thrive where they are celebrated is simply inspiring to see.  Hearing people chant “And we will come back home” and believing it with every part of their being is simply moving to watch, and I hope that The Greatest Showman will be shown along Freaks in the future and that they both will have a devoted group of fans.  

Something that needs to be noted since I’m worried the illinformed will try to state that The Greatest Showman offers more fact than fiction; those people are either incredibly ignorant to the world or just wish to believe a myth rather than facts.  Phineas Taylor Barnum exploited people to benefit himself, while some would say that he used capitalism to help him gain his fortune I would say that he had a case of schadenfreude.  I personally will never envy anyone who makes a fortune at the misfortune of others, and I think that is something that the film never truly addressed which is understandable for a film that is meant to be a piece of holiday escapism, but when looking at it as a historically based film it clearly wants to whitewash the history.  

The Greatest Showman has some amazing highs but it also has some incredible lows which makes the film incredibly frustrating.  It’s baffling when a film is able to have some of the best musical numbers that I have ever seen, but then it can’t get the story structure strong enough to continue moving forward.  I wish it was possible to just watch the splashy musical numbers on the silver screen and cut the excess,  but since that isn’t reality I cannot recommend The Greatest Showman as highly as I would like.     

Rating: Rent It

-Jonny G