Movie Review: The Greatest Showman

The Greatest Showman *** / *****

Directed by: Michael Gracey.

Written by: Jenny Bicks and Bill Condon.

Starring: Hugh Jackman (P.T. Barnum), Michelle Williams (Charity Barnum), Zac Efron (Phillip Carlyle), Zendaya (Anne Wheeler), Rebecca Ferguson (Jenny Lind), Austyn Johnson (Caroline Barnum), Cameron Seely (Helen Barnum), Keala Settle (Lettie Lutz), Sam Humphrey (Tom Thumb), Yahya Abdul-Mateen II (W.D. Wheeler), Eric Anderson (Mr. O'Malley), Ellis Rubin (Young Barnum), Skylar Dunn (Young Charity). 

 

You already know if you’ll like The Greatest Showman if you’ve seen a preview for the film. If the preview makes you roll your eyes or gag, stay far, far away from the film. This is both the cheesiest and most earnest musical in recent memory – a film that doesn’t even try to be cool of hip or edgy, but just goes straight for easy sentiment. If you hate that, you will hate – and I mean HATE – this film. If, on the other hand, there is a part of you that can admire a film that so joyously embrace its cheesiness – that I can literally have a scene in which Hugh Jackman leaves London in a full sprint to try and win back his wife, and finds you – dress billowing – as she looks out at the sea, that boy, is this movie for you.

 

The Greatest Showman is based on the story of P.T. Barnum – but bares almost no resemblance to the actual man – who was pretty much a horrible person, as opposed to Hugh Jackman’s smiling, happy, family man in this film. Here, Barnum is a dreamer, who scams his way into a bank loan to buy a museum of curiosities in New York, and then when that’s in trouble, decides to stock it with the “freaks” – little people, big people, bearded ladies, black trapeze artists, and all sorts of other people that polite society deem unacceptable. Barnum has never heard of such a word. Instead of exploiting them (as what really happened) – here the whole thing becomes a celebration of life and diversity – with Barnum doing it all for his beloved wife and daughters. When he becomes a financial success, but still has high society look down on him, he enlists rich, pretty boy Phillip Carlyle (Zac Efron) to make him respectable. That doesn’t really work – but perhaps putting on a tour with Europe’s most celebrated singer, Jenny Lind (Rebecca Ferguson), will. But of course, doesn’t P.T. Barnum know that all he really needs to be is true to himself?

 

The movie is cheesy to be sure – the original songs are cheesy, the costumes are cheesy, the sets are cheesy, the dancing, you guessed it, cheesy. The romance between Zac Efron and Zendaya shouldn’t work at all, given how thinly written it is, but boy, do those two sell it. And it’s still not as cheesy as everything having to do with Michelle Williams, who seems to have been cast because she can wear the hell out of old fashioned dressed (to be fair, that’s true).

 

And through it all, your master of ceremonies is Hugh Jackman, clearly having the time of his life. Sure, he’s done a movie musical before – but as good as he was in Les Miserables, he kind of had to play a sad sack character. Here, he gets to go for broke in each and every moment of the film, each and every song and dance number. He is perhaps the only one who could make this movie work – and he does.

 

I know a lot of people will hate this film – as a teenager, I would have been one of them. I don’t think it’s a particularly good film know. But it’s earnest and cheesy and fun, and it works while it plays. It doesn’t linger in your mind long after (except for a couple of ear worm songs) – but it does what it sets out to do, and isn’t ashamed of it – nor should it be.