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
