Old Yorker

  • The Greatest Showman

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Michael Gracey (2017)

    Showbiz biopic clichés come thick and fast in The Greatest Showman but fast is good.  Michael Gracey’s musical is commendably, sometimes comically, brisk in working through the formulaic plot – the rags-to-riches story of the impresario Phineas Taylor Barnum (Hugh Jackman), his sudden fall from grace, his final redemption.  Barnum hits rock bottom when his circus burns down, Jenny Lind (Rebecca Ferguson), a major money-spinner for him, abruptly quits her concert tour because he resists her attempts to seduce him, and his wife Charity (Michelle Williams) packs her bags, believing that her husband has been having an affair with the ‘Swedish nightingale’.  At this point, Barnum goes to drown his sorrows in a bar and I needed a quick toilet break.  The speed at which crises come and go in the film made me sure that, by the time I returned, the hero would have got his mojo back, and so it proves.   He and Charity are reconciled.  Barnum re-launches his show as a big-tent circus on the New York waterfront; it’s a smash hit but he hands over the reins to his business partner Phillip Carlyle (Zac Efron), leaving Barnum free to devote more time to being a husband and father.

    Michael Gracey and the writers (Jenny Bicks and Bill Condon) use the protagonist’s life as a kind of movie coat rack, on which to hang MTV-ish song and dance, an emotional roller-coaster ride and a celebration of diversity.  P T Barnum, in the popular imagination, was a huckster of genius:

    ‘It’s a Barnum and Bailey world

    Just as phony as it can be …’

    There’s no Bailey in The Greatest Showman (he has turned into the fictional creation Phillip Carlyle) and the film is at pains to underplay the essence of Barnum that ‘It’s Only a Paper Moon’ immortalised.  It prefers to portray him as a man who, way ahead of his time (the mid-nineteenth century), gave career opportunities to the variously marginalised – the human ‘oddities and curiosities’ who joined his circus troupe – General Tom Thumb (Sam Humphrey), a bearded lady (Keala Settle), the non-white trapeze artists Anne Wheeler (Zendaya) and her brother (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II), and so on.  This Barnum is a gifted entrepreneur but it’s his sweet little daughters (Austyn Johnson and Cameron Seely) who put in his head the idea of recruiting living freaks of nature, to replace the waxwork versions on display in Barnum’s American Museum, an earlier and less commercially successful venture.  The film-makers also play down as much as possible the idea of a public appetite for spectacular deformity etc.  The circus audience on screen comprises two groups.  The majority are rather smart-looking people who cheer and applaud Barnum’s cast as if they too are delighted to see these characters emerge from the shadows to which social prejudice has consigned them.  The persistent minority are vicious freakophobes and racists, whose appearance is down at heel.  That poverty itself is marginalising and conducive to intolerance is ignored:  this lot are nothing more or less than brutal nasties.

    It’s no bad thing that the world of The Greatest Showman is far removed from that of Tod Browning’s Freaks (1932) but the effect of reducing Barnum’s abnormal personnel to an I-am-who-I-am chorus line, striving for equal opportunities, is banal.  Besides, the film is anxious to de-emphasise their aberrance:  Barnum – his charlatan side comes in handy here – gives his fat man (Daniel Eldridge) padding and his giant (Radu Spinghel) stilts-enhanced extra height.  With their boss so personally sympathetic from the start, I wondered how the film was going to engineer a conflict between him and the ‘freaks’.  When this arrives, it’s short-lived but long enough for a big musical number:  preoccupied with promoting Jenny Lind, Barnum excludes his oddities from a social gathering at which Jenny is the centre of attention.  This triggers the self-assertive showstopper ‘This is Me’, performed by the circus troupe with the bearded Lettie Lutz taking centre stage.  The titles give a good idea of the prevailing aspirational thrust of the musical numbers.  As well as ‘This is Me’, these include ‘A Million Dreams’, ‘Come Alive’, ‘Never Enough’ and ‘Rewrite the Stars’.  The song score, by Benj Pasek and Justin Paul (they also wrote the lyrics to the numbers in La La Land), is serviceable but musically as well as thematically repetitive.   Jenny Lind, famous for her operatic repertoire, delivers (in ‘Never Enough’) the same kind of stuff as the circus folks.  (The numbers are all ‘original’ – that is, the movies doesn’t draw on the songs written by Cy Coleman and Michael Stewart for the successful 1980 stage musical Barnum.)

    The Greatest Showman seems at first to be trying to pass itself off as an old-style wholesome musical.  It does this awkwardly but is more self-confident once it gets into its music video groove.   After a while, the formula has such a stranglehold that the film becomes almost restfully reassuring:  you watch sure of just what will happen to steer the story towards its inevitable upbeat finale.  The narrative operates in a sealed-off screen world of irreality – once Barnum and Charity have turned from adolescents (Ellis Rubin and Skylar Dunn) into grown-ups, the passage of time is a mystery.  Hugh Jackman and Michelle Williams look pretty well the same age throughout, although her hairstyle occasionally changes.  As for the Barnums’ daughters … Sally, who liked the film a lot more than I did, reasonably suggested that these two girls should join the circus troupe:  neither ever grows an inch.

    Hugh Jackman comes across, as usual, as a thoroughly nice chap.  Since he doesn’t remotely suggest a chancer, he’s highly suitable for the film’s dubious characterisation of Barnum.  A fine singer and a good dancer (and runner), Jackman is much more comfortable than he was playing Jean Valjean, a dramatic heavyweight in comparison, in Les Misérables (let alone his role in Prisoners).   Zac Efron, with the High School Musical franchise and Hairspray behind him, is a competent right-hand man.  Michelle Williams gives Charity warmth but her integrity as a performer is counterproductive:  we’re so used to seeing this actress being convincingly truthful that memories of her in other roles expose the falsity of what she’s asked to do here.  A visit by the circus troupe to Europe, which appears to happen simply in order for Barnum to meet Jenny Lind, includes a refreshingly bizarre interpretation of Queen Victoria (by Gayle Rankin).  Ashley Wallen’s choreography is jolly and dynamic.  (I was puzzled by a couple of dance duets – the first between Barnum and Charity, the second between Carlyle and Anne – in which the participants are obviously transformed into CGI entities and whizz about in a weirdly speeded-up way.)  Michael Gracey shows an appealing penchant for turning everyday noise into something rhythmical – not just the company’s stamping feet but the sound, for example, of playbills being hammered into place.   The film is handsomely shot and attractively coloured by Seamus McGarvey.  The fact that The Greatest Showman is just as phony as it can be turns out to be part of its minor charm.

    31 December 2017

  • Mandingo

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Richard Fleischer (1975)

    ‘Expect the savage.  The sensual.  The shocking.  The sad.  The powerful.  The shameful … all that the motion picture has never dared to show before.  Expect the truth.  Now you are ready for Mandingo.’

    I took my seat prepared to experience everything the wordy poster for Richard Fleischer’s film advised.  Expectations were largely disappointed though the film is occasionally shocking and, all told, verges on shameful.

    Based on a ‘big, bold, best-seller’ of 1957 by Kyle Onstott, adapted for the screen by Norman Wexler, Mandingo centres on racist structures and atrocities in the antebellum South and the coming of age of Hammond (Perry King), the son of plantation owner Warren Maxwell (James Mason).  Hammond marries his nympho-dipso cousin Blanche (Susan George) but soon suspects that she’s had incest with her brother Charles (Ben Masters).  Hammond buys a black woman called Ellen (Brenda Sykes) as a sex slave and gets her pregnant.  He also buys, at greater expense, a Mandingo slave, Ganymede (Ken Norton), known as ‘Mede’, and trains him to be a successful and, from Hammond’s point of view profitable, bare-knuckle prize-fighter.  While the men are away from the plantation, the spiteful, drunken Blanche horsewhips Ellen, who falls downstairs and loses her baby.  When she receives a ruby necklace from Hammond, Blanche assumes she’s set for a reconciliation with him until, at dinner one night, she sees that Ellen, who is serving the meal, is wearing matching ruby earrings.  Blanche pulls off her necklace and chucks it in her soup. The next time that Hammond is away, she seduces Mede.  Warren Maxwell, getting impatient for a grandchild, locks Hammond and Blanche in a room together.  He seems to have achieved the desired result when Blanche announces she’s expecting.  A thaw in relations between her and Hammond lasts only until Blanche gives birth to a mixed-race baby, who is killed on doctor’s orders.  Hammond takes revenge on his faithless wife by poisoning her.  He then orders Mede into a cauldron of boiling water.  When Mede refuses, Hammond shoots him and, when he falls into the cauldron, uses a pitchfork to drown him.  An elderly slave called Agamemnon (Richard Ward), although he’s previously reproached Mede for Uncle Tomism, grabs Hammond’s shotgun and threatens him with it.  When Warren Maxwell arrives on the scene, branding him a ‘crazy nigger’ and demanding that he put the weapon down, Agamemnon shoots Warren instead and makes his escape.  Hammond weeps by his father’s dead body.  Mandingo ends, as it began, with Muddy Waters on the soundtrack, singing a bluesy song with music by Maurice Jarre.

    Mandingo exploits themes that are hackneyed but commercially reliable; American critics who’ve slated the film and made it notorious may also have helped ensure its box-office success.    Kenneth Robinson in the Spectator made the point that the contemptuous reception of the film in the US press was encouraging – on the dubious grounds that, not many years ago, any picture with a racial setting of this kind would have been taken seriously and even treated reverently.   It’s ironic, in relation to Robinson’s comments, that the people who made Mandingo seem to think they’re protected by the Hollywood tradition of using the iniquities of pre-Civil War plantation life to make morally serious comment.  The producer Dino De Laurentiis and Richard Fleischer want to pretend that a tough subject demands tough, uncompromising treatment.  But all this makes the picture sound hotter to handle than it is.  Every so often, Fleischer manages to leer.  A brothel door opens just wide enough to present a full-frontal nude employee; another prostitute gets so turned on by Mede that the towel covering her wobbling breasts slips off without her noticing.  For the most part, though, Fleischer handles the excitative aspects rather dutifully.  The sex is presented with a minimum of salacious flair.  The violence – whippings, fist fights, even the final carnage – is low on visceral effect.

    The characters are Southern potboiler stereotypes.  There’s the tyrannical but straight-talkin’ paterfamilias; the son who has a conscience of sorts but will (therefore) never be the man his father is;  the spoilt belle-bitch; the silent, suffering black man who, against his will, demonstrates an ability to give a white woman what her white husband can’t or won’t; the nice, relatively sexless black house staff.  The slaves have fancy, allusive names – as well as Ganymede and Agamemnon, there’s Lucretia Borgia (Lillian Hayman).   At moments, Richard Fleischer seems easily shocked:  James Mason’s character refers to an abolitionist as a ‘bastard’ and the word reverberates on the soundtrack as if to imply we should be shocked by such reactionary profanity.

    Susan George is quite powerful in Blanche’s nasty, petulant rages but overdoes the constant breathlessness.  Perry King gives a clear, competent performance as Hammond and Brenda Sykes does well in the underwritten role of Ellen – with her lovely, doomed features, Sykes manages to be touching without pushing for sympathy.  The heavyweight boxing champion Ken Norton is, in terms of physical qualifications, an obviously suitable choice for Mede but he’s not so good when he tries to act.  Mede’s offended stares at Hammond are plain inexpressive – they suggest no feeling of hurt, betrayal or humiliation.  Norton speaks in an unassured, actorish voice – he sounds too well spoken and is incongruous in a film in which plenty of the dialogue is hard to make it.  The other most clearly audible performer is James Mason, who manages to turn the climactic mayhem into comedy.  Mason’s Deep South accent, shaky throughout, switches unexpectedly into Afrikaner for Massa Maxwell’s crucial abusive jeer at Agamemnon.   I wish I could believe this was an intentional attempt to draw a racist parallel between the southern states of nineteenth-century America and present-day South Africa.

    [1970s]

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