Movie Review #27: The Greatest Showman - The Most Dangerous Golden Globe Nominee On Earth

The Greatest Showman (2017)
Director: Michael Gracey
Writer(s): Jenny Bicks, Bill Condon
Starring: Hugh Jackman, Zac Efron, Michelle Williams

Ladies and gentlemen! Step right up! Step right up! I have for you today a film not meant to be seen by decent eyes, a film so gross, so exploitative, so awful on every conceivable and philosophical level that it made this viewer want to leave the theatre early. It is said this film was spawned from some of the darkest, most perverted minds of our generation: the screenwriters for Sex and the City and Gnome. Featuring performances from a retired Wolverine, former child stars from High School Musical and Shake It Up!, and an Academy Award nominated actress who just can't quite catch the right break! A disastrous, ill-conceived mess the likes of which have never been seen before! Ladies and gentlemen, I give you: The Greatest Showman!

Do not mistake my jovial, sarcastic introduction to this review as a recommendation of seeing this film ironically. This isn't a "so bad it's good film": it's a "so bad you want to punch the director in the face film." I haven't been so angry while watching a film this year since the rancid Beauty and the Beast remake, but The Greatest Showman is so many times worse that they shouldn't even be judged on the same scale. Beauty and the Beast (2017) was a bad film because it actively thwarted the best qualities of the original film and tried too hard to please too many people. The Greatest Showman, by contrast, somehow manages to get everything wrong: script, cinematography, acting, structure, pacing, mise en scene, editing. However, despite its completely dysfunctional framework, the film carries with it a sense of arrogance and entitlement that is honestly insulting. It truly is a joyless affair, one of the worst films of the year and quite possibly the worst movie musical I've ever seen.

The Greatest Showman is the story of P. T. Barnum (Hugh Jackman) on his path to forming the modern American circus industry. The film begins at its ending, showing Barnum at the very top of the circus world, before quickly flashing back to his childhood courtship of his wife, Charity (Michelle Williams). Barnum works hard, passing through the doldrums of American white-collar life before stumbling upon his true calling: sleight-of-hand, the macabre, and other sorts of low-brow "humbug." He assembles a troupe of minorities and disabled persons, using their appearance to court the favor of the masses. He even gets himself a new partner in Phillip Carlyle (Zac Efron), a well-to-do playwright who finds new life in joining the circus. However, when Barnum discovers Swedish soprano Jenny Lind (Rebecca Ferguson), he sees a way to finally fit in with the old guard of wealth rather than be pegged as a vulgar member of the nouveau riche. Will this new development put a strain on his marriage? Will it alienate him from the people who made it famous? Have you seen the ending to a Hollywood blockbuster musical before? All will be revealed in the fascinating true story of The Greatest Showman.

I'll begin by deconstructing the musical failings of The Greatest Showman, as they are, ultimately, the reason I went to see the film. The biggest problem: the songs are horrible. The Greatest Showman's soundtrack is comprised mostly of pop songs structured around the sonic techniques of late 2010s top 40 pop, modeled primarily on the monotonal melodic stylings of Taylor Swift and the "millennial whoop" of pop rock acts like Imagine Dragons and X Ambassadors. Most of these songs could be inserted into advertisements for automobiles and would be utterly indistinguishable from radio singles. While there's nothing inherently wrong to aping the aesthetic of pop radio - after all, many of the greatest musicals in American history (Guys and Dolls, Kiss Me, Kate, A Chorus Line) were essentially then-contemporaneous pop songs set to a plot - not a single one of these songs uses that aesthetic effectively or appropriately. Most of the melodies fail to create emotionally cathartic or satisfying cadences, relying on sheer volume and bombast to produce musical effects that the compositions themselves fail to achieve. Moreover, not one lyric from the show lands with any emotional punch. And, of course, the soundtrack is slathered with so much vocal doubling and pitch alteration that it's almost impossible to identify the actual human voices producing the sound, let alone appreciate the individual words being sung. These songs, in effect, function as little more than ambience to heavily produced and edited choreography.

Moreover, the Top 40 song structures don't fit the visual aesthetic seeks to present. Though The Greatest Showman attempts to portray P. T. Barnum's circus as the cutting edge theatre of its era, more akin to modern stadium rock than the organ-grinder entertainment with which we now associate it, its details in costuming and set design firmly establish the film's diegesis within the 1840s. To hear these characters, clothed in period dress, burst into modern American song produces a severe sense of whiplash. Nowhere is this effect more jarring than in Jenny Lind's opera performance. During the scenes preceding the performance, Lind has been framed as a truly unique voice: the most beloved soprano in all of Europe. Her aria is intended to be one of the most cathartic moments of the film, as it is the first time Barnum has ever tasted "high" culture and steeped himself in the culture of the elite. And the result: a Christina Perri-lite pop song that could be handily performed by any high school sophomore mezzo-soprano at an open mic night. Framing Ferguson's performance as that of a great opera singer - let alone an opera singer the film intends to be the vocal highlight of the film - is laughable for regular film-going audiences and downright insulting to those who have an appreciation for the dedication and craft required to be an opera star. Finally, let us not forget that The Greatest Showman is a musical about the circus, an enterprise that has genres of music associated with it. Great composers - Saint-Saëns, Khachaturian, Rossini, Sousa - have composed works invariably associated with revelry and merriment; not one of their works is quoted or referenced in any of these songs. Heck, the film doesn't even play a snippet of Julius Fucik's "Entry of the Gladiators": the pop culture shorthand for circus fare. Allow me lend some credit to Cy Coleman's flawed musical, Barnum: at least its score was informed by the aesthetic and diegesis of the story.

Worse still are the lyrics of the songs themselves. Pasek and Paul - of Dear Evan Hansen and La La Land fame - composed both the lyrics and the individual songs of The Greatest Showman, leaving orchestration and score duties to veteran orchestrator John Debney. Their track record has been inconsistent, to say the least, as they've produced a bad libretto for every good libretto, and many might well question the quality even of those librettos that have been well received (i.e. Dear Evan Hansen). The Greatest Showman, however, is likely their worst work to date. The lyrics of The Greatest Showman are empty shells bereft of meaning or sentiment, content to shout "this is me!" as if it were a poignant dramatic statement and not a re-hash of a cliché better handled by the Disney Channel in Camp Rock. Many numbers are also lyrically tone-deaf. In "Rewrite the Stars," the love song that serves as the emotional core of the film's B-plot, the song's tone runs in the opposite direction of the story itself. Carlyle, romantically attracted to a black trapeze artist played by Zendaya, must declare his love to prove to her that he is no longer bound by the will of his racist parents. The first words from his lips: "You know I want you." Pasek and Paul aren't inept: they do know that "want" carries the implication of lust while the word "love" carries actual emotional weight. The scene needs the word "love" in order for it to work; the entire point of it is demonstrating that Carlyle's affections are real and will not be turned aside merely because of social stigma. However, Pasek and Paul also know that "want" is more marketable to a top 40 audience and to high-school age couples wanting to sing to each other at karaoke night. Thus, their song willfully undermines the story while attempting to market the film's soundtrack. Similar disjunctions of tone and composition occur throughout the film, and the musical itself turns into a jumbled mess.

Most of the praise for The Greatest Showman has been heaped upon its choreography. It doesn't meet the hype. Sure, all of Hugh Jackman, Zac Efron, and Zendaya's choreography is sharp and snappy, but next to none of it is genuinely impressive given that half the film's musical numbers are shot in shadow. More damning, though, is the fact that most of the film's musical numbers are laden with dozens of jump cuts, allowing the actors' multiple opportunities to get the right takes of individual bars of the music. Now, any good movie musical is going to get multiple takes of a sequence, but most leave at least one steady non-cut dance break per musical number to effectively say, "yes, it actually is the actors performing these dance moves." The Greatest Showman constantly cheats, cutting to the in-universe audience, close-ups of the actors' faces, lens flares in between tracking shots, images of poorly CGI-d elephants and lions, pan-outs of the entire set. Many of the film's sequences actually benefit from the game of "spot the stunt double," as the exercise is often more informative about the process of filmmaking than enjoying the film itself. The movie may be trying to play sleight-of-hand, much like actual carnies, but it has failed to apply misdirection and performs the same tricks too many times.

Above all, The Greatest Showman doesn't seem to understand the structure of movie musicals. Songs in modern musicals, since the days of Oklahoma!, function to expand and explain feelings implicit to the characters and develop the story. The songs in The Greatest Showman do occur during emotional moments, but rarely, if ever, do they actually perform a storytelling function. The closest is Charity's "Tightrope" sequence towards the end of the second act, describing her anxieties during her husband's national tour with Jenny Lind. There are some genuinely decent shots and cuts during this sequence, and one does learn information that could not be developed in any form other than a musical number. Most of the other songs in the show, however, are window-dressing to emotional moments rather than necessary pieces. The film's most acclaimed song, "This Is Me!," performed by the circus performers is supposed to be a rousing anthem of self-affirmation a la Hamilton's "My Shot" (speaking of which, this film is most certainly angling to win over Hamilton fans; if this reviewer's opinion of both works is of any merit, it has clearly failed); in effect, though, it fails to accomplish a sense of courage beyond the performers' decision to silently stand amidst the elite: if anything, the bombast serves to lessen the drama and the effectiveness of the film's message. Musical numbers should never serve to the story's detriment, but the songs of The Greatest Showman are little more than expensive distractions, keys jangled in front of the eyes of the audience with the expectation that they have the attention span of chimpanzees. The film attempts to depict Barnum's fakery and humbug as a noble practice, but it does so through fakery and humbug of its own: its abysmal musical structure.

That said, if one removed all of the music from The Greatest Showman, would the film work? The answer, unsurprisingly, is no. The Greatest Showman's story is utterly bereft of structure, coherence, and meaning. The motivations of the characters are muddled, the pacing is rushed, and the plot lines aren't focused. The dialogue is little more than false whimsy, flimsy exposition, and pseudo-witty quips; it attempts to capture the charm of Oscar Wilde and Charles Dickens, but it more often than not ends up sounding like the incoherent prose of a bad college play. At its core, however, The Greatest Showman doesn't know what it's actually about. Most great biopic and musical stories can be summed up in one sentence, a single theme that underpins the film's narrative, tone, and characters. Let's consider some examples:

Gandhi: The sacrifices of one man can shake the foundations of a nation.
Lincoln: Sometimes men must betray their own morality in order to achieve a noble goal.
Singin' in the Rain: The combination of sight and sound gives us greater insight into the truth than sight alone.
Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street: Single-minded obsession is just as damning and de-humanizing as the industrial revolution.

The Greatest Showman ostensibly presents many potential sentences that could serve as its message, but its plot structure abandons each thread as soon as they are raised.

The film's first "theme" so to speak is that of making dreams come true through ingenuity, wit, and charm; even if deception is involved, the joy of a child or audience member's wonder is worth the trickery. Most every element of The Greatest Showman helps establish this motif. Barnum's story begins with him exposing first his wife and next his daughters to the fantastic light shows to be found within the natural world and through tinkering with office supplies. The film's version of newspaper magnate James Gordon Bennett is a straw man theatre critic whose narrative function is naysaying the fraud at work within the Barnum circus. Bennett and Barnum verbally joust throughout the film, the former calling Barnum a hack and the latter calling Bennett an elitist who likes to destroy wonder and dreams. Philip Carlyle's life in the theatre is stuffy and constraining, while his time with the circus is liberating and inspiring. Heck, the name of the movie is The Greatest Showman: it's fitting that it would be a film about showmanship.

No sooner is this theme established than does the movie do everything it can to undermine it. The film immediately makes us uncomfortable by suggesting Barnum's performers aren't exactly comfortable with the various "enhancements" Barnum makes to their act; while they get used to it, this discomfort never goes away. The people who destroy Barnum's circus aren't people who disdain fakery and dishonesty but are instead a gaggle of racist lowbrows whose only real complaint is that Barnum's circus hires freedmen. Most importantly, Barnum himself gives up his showman mantle to Carlyle at the end of the film, finding pleasure within the more refined experience of his daughter's ballet recital. The implications of this reversal are rather filthy as well: if the text is to be taken as it is, the "high arts" - ballet, theatre, and literature - must be enjoyed exclusively by the aristocracy, whilst the "low art" of the circus may only ever be appreciated by the common rabble. After all, for the rich, such entertainment will always be mere "amusement," as the film's Queen Victoria would put it.

But perhaps this is not the theme of the movie. Maybe the movie's core lies in the other primary narrative: Barnum's vaulting ambition. Throughout the film, Barnum keeps trying to impress the old guard, never satisfied with his standing within the nouveau riche. He buys a house down the block from Charity's rich father (just to show him up, acts like an entitled brat in parties, and tours around with Jenny Lind purely to acquire respectability. His wife, Charity, keeps telling him to slow down and take time away from his work. His first circus literally crashes and burns thanks to his arrogance, and his marriage very nearly falls apart thanks to his dilly-dallying with Jenny Lind. The film may be saying that one should be content with what one has and not lose sight of it: a standard movie musical theme, but one worth returning to at various points in one's life.

However, this theme doesn't work either. If accepting one's place and what one has was the theme of the movie, the film wouldn't have a right to exist. It wouldn't be the story of a tailor's son whose ingenuity propelled him to being a circus magnate; it would be about a poor tailor remaining a poor tailor -  Fiddler on the Roof rather than Citizen Kane. Worse still is the fact that Barnum never actually learns his lesson. Sure, his circus gets burned and his marriage nearly falls apart, but he manages to resolve both of these problems with absolutely no effort. His circus: rebuilt via deus ex machina. His marriage: all he has to do is say he's sorry one time. Heck, Barnum doesn't even come to reckon with his place within the nouveau riche. Sure, he hands over the rings of the circus to Carlyle at the film's conclusion, but he comes back to the New York Ballet - a symbol the film establishes as the domain of the aristocracy - to watch his daughter perform amongst hoity-toity high class friends. Since Barnum himself doesn't change, the film doesn't have an arc.

Let's try the lowest common denominator theme, the theme featured in more movies than can be counted: be yourself. After all, this is the theme of "This Is Me!," the Golden Globe-nominated song from the film. Perhaps this is the film's real core: after all, Barnum is a showman and he returns to being a showman after failing to be the manager of an opera star. Carlyle has to "find himself" by joining the circus and leaving his family behind. Sure, this message might be trite, but at least it is a message... yet it still doesn't work. Who, at the end of the day, is The Greatest Showman's P. T. Barnum? Sure, he likes whimsy, but he also likes power. He loves his family, but he also seems to prefer his work to his relatives. Sure, he's charming, but he's also a trickster and a thief. At the end of the film, P. T. Barnum hands over the reins of his circus and goes to spend time with his family; is this really his true self? This is not to discuss the broader issues inherent to the message, "be yourself," particularly the notion that societal stigma is a mechanism by which many individuals learn to identify genuine personality flaws and thereby push themselves to overcome them. While this implication doesn't apply to the circus performers, it certainly applies to Barnum and Carlyle. All that said, The Greatest Showman fails to properly convey even the most standard message in musical theatre history. At its core, the film has nothing to say: it's just a bunch of bright flashy images, dance sequences, and bad songs that serves to waste the audience's time.

These major structural and storytelling flaws overshadow those flaws that would normally be endemic to bad movie musicals. I already touched upon the pitch correction and studio manipulations that I hate, but The Greatest Showman commits many more musical faux pas: improper vowel formation, female vocals without breath support or chest connection, absence of properly written harmonies, tedious orchestration, over-emphasis on unhealthy belting techniques that are dangerous models for maturing voices. The special effects are particularly cringe-worthy. Much of the CGI in this movie - especially that of the lions and elephants - would have barely made the cut back in 2005. The make-up of Keala Settle's bearded woman is so clearly fake that the viewer never believes it was natural. Moreover, very few members of The Greatest Showman's cast of performers were actual minorities or disabled persons, so the film is most certainly guilty of white-washing. All of these factors distract from the cinematic experience and weaken the movie.

If the technique is bad, the sexism is horrendous. Every major female character in The Greatest Showman is a person more acted upon than acting. Charity gets one solo number to herself, a song dedicated to how much she wants her husband to come back home but spends the rest of the film an utterly dutiful housewife, always cast in the glow of a Madonna. One might as well replace her with a glowing ball of light functioning as a symbol for all that is good. The only reason Zendaya's character exists is to tease out a romance between her and Carlyle, establishing a new breeding pair for the circus lineage and pairing former Disney channel stars so as to get the fangirls cooing. Worst of all is the fate of Jenny Lind. The real life Jenny Lind was not considered a great beauty, but this film transforms her into a shallow seductress trope, slathering so much make-up onto Ms. Ferguson's face as to make her look like a walking Dior ad. All of the women in this movie are little more than props, shallow personifications of "good," "evil," and "unfortunate" with no agency, motivation, or identity. Not to mention, surprise, surprise, this film doesn't pass the Bechdel test: every single conversation these women have throughout the film in some way relates to the men in their life. Though a film needn't pass the Bechdel test to be feminist, any film should, at the very least, have the dignity and good sense to not write its female actors into such lazy, underwritten roles.

As one could presumably tell from the preceding criticisms, I don't think The Greatest Showman is a very good movie. In fact, I think it's a horribly constructed film from start to finish. However, I've certainly seen plenty of bad movies, many with even worse structural rot than The Greatest Showman. However, few of these movies are so hateful and ill-conceived as The Greatest Showman. For all the flaws I've previously discussed are the minor flaws in the film. Yes: the broken structure, tepid script, gross sexism, and awful music are the minor flaws. The greatest flaw in The Greatest Showman is the very goal it sets out to achieve: the creation of a biopic glorifying the life of P. T. Barnum. Looking at the finished product, it is clear that no one in the cast or crew of The Greatest Showman stopped for but a second to consider whether or not this was a morally worthwhile, let alone cinematically engaging, enterprise. To truly understand why The Greatest Showman is one of the worst films I've ever seen, we need to explore the story of the real P. T. Barnum.

If the narrative of The Greatest Showman is to be believed, P. T. Barnum was a whimsical, delightful man who seized the opportunity to offer joy unto the lower classes with displays of spectacle, in stark opposition to the cloistered theatrical world reserved for the well-to-do. Sure, he might have delighted in trickery and humbug, but it was all for the greater good of the public. His marital infidelities were his only true flaw. Indeed, if not for the work of P. T. Barnum, the modern world of movie magic might not have existed. P. T. Barnum should thus be admired as an innovator and truly great man, a man whose entrepreneurship in the face of hardship makes him a model for every young man and woman sitting in the audience.

To quote a Jedi master, every word in that last paragraph was wrong.

As The Greatest Showman accurately portrays, P. T. Barnum was a conman and a thief who built an industry upon deceit, humbug, and trickery. However, he was, first and foremost, a racist, misogynist, and ablist capitalist who saw the opportunity to earn millions by exploiting the disabled and deformed. He willfully gathered a group of individuals afflicted with various physical conditions - dwarfism, gigantism, hypertrichosis, conjoinment - and marketed their bodies as commodities for the enjoyment of his audiences. His "circus" was not of mere spectacle; the more appropriate term would be the now (justly) politically-incorrect phrase Barnum and his associates would have used to describe his enterprise: "freak show." Contemporaneous critics deplored Barnum's circus for exposing the public to "indecency," a deplorably racist and ablist critique that missed the true horror of Barnum's enterprise. Barnum's actual evil was the exploitation of the performers themselves, performers given pittance salaries while Barnum pocketed the profits. Perhaps the most telling anecdote of Barnum's modus operandi was the story of his most popular act: "General Tom Thumb." "General Tom Thumb," properly named Charles Stratton, was a member of Barnum's circus from the time he was four: a child laborer suffering from dwarfism who ridiculed himself by tap-dancing, miming, and performing impressions all for the amusement of the audience.

The word most commonly used to describe Barnum was not entrepreneur, trickster, or magician: it was "showman." Barnum propagated an industry of "showing" the fates of the less fortunate, spinning fantastic yet false narratives about the upbringings and origins of each "freak" in the line-up. The entire show centered on one four-word unspoken sentiment, "Thank God I'm not _____": "Thank God I'm not hairy"; "Thank God I'm not a little person"; "Thank God I'm not covered in tattoos"; "Thank God I'm not covered in tumors"; most common and nefarious of all, "Thank God I'm not black." Barnum claimed to give his audience joy, but the only joy it felt was smug self-satisfaction in its white, lower middle-class identity. So long as it could delight in the exploitation and subordination of people of other ethnicities and suffering from disabilities, it could take a twisted pride in itself. Barnum may have been an abolitionist, but he and his industry entrenched the racism at the heart of the white supremacist system.

The Greatest Showman would have been repugnant enough had it simply chosen to ignore the actual facts about the real P. T. Barnum, but it manages to go a step below by actively pretending that Barnum's circus was a crusade of inclusion rather than an industry predicated upon discrimination. The film willfully distorts history to make itself more appealing. Very few of the performers in Barnum's circus are actually afflicted with the same disabilities the real Barnum's performers suffered from, both whitewashing the film and decreasing the cognitive dissonance the film audience would experience when trying to come to terms with Barnum's racist legacy. The performers treat the circus as if it were a family when most of the real Barnum employees viewed it as a job, and a degrading one at that. Barnum willfully associates with his performers throughout the film, when most historical evidence suggests he treated them as if they were less than dirt. When the film can't cover up or falsely re-contextualize history, it outright fabricates it. The character of Philip Carlyle is an invention, created solely to establish a forbidden love subplot between a white man and a black woman: a move intended to boost sales figures and pander for meaningless awards rather than discuss the dynamics of race and romance in pre-Civil War era America. After all, including the real life interactions between P. T. Barnum and his more corporate focused partner, James Anthony Bailey, making business decisions that forever worsened the livelihood of dozens of disabled persons, would have been "uninteresting." The film tries to present Barnum's humbug in a positive light, but it fails to recognize that its own story is humbug of the lowest pedigree.

Worst of all, though, is the fact that The Greatest Showman makes its audience complicit in its own moral depravity. Most any film that seeks to depict circus performers could fall prey to the same ethical trap of Barnum's circus: regardless of the movie's intention, the audience is engaging in the same spectacle of beholding the disabled as those original theatre goers. The only way to remove the audience from this type of exploitative engagement with the original circus is to depict its ugliness head on; instead of entrenching the "thank God I'm not" sentiment of the circus, the film should make the audience feel uncomfortable for being complicit in a world that perpetuated the circus for so long.   This is why the Tod Browning horror film, Freaks, is considered a horror classic and an essential piece of cinema history; since the villains in the film are the "normal" people, the audience's horror towards the fates of the "freaks" is not one of exploitation but of empathy. The Greatest Showman does not depict the horror of Barnum's practices. Rather, it delights in bringing the audience into its world. Instead of being a glorified cage, the circus becomes a "home for the downtrodden" where the masses can enjoy themselves... much like the film industry. It's fairly clear The Greatest Showman intends Barnum's vision to be representative of Hollywood itself, producing "exposure" for the downtrodden in the face of the outright racism of the public, all the while containing more than its fair share of problematic practices. If the film intended to make people feel positive will towards Hollywood, it does the exact opposite.

This, ladies and gentlemen, is the misbegotten narrative of The Greatest Showman. No doubt its horrors made you wish you might find some way to stop its ill effects from being wrought upon the public. However, the power resides in you to save your souls and those of others from this. First, I suggest not even going to the theatre to save this film. Next, I propose donating one's time and attention to any number of other worthy cinematic enterprises. The excellent recent Star Wars film, for instance. Any of the other Golden Globe nominees. The Godfather is coming out on Netflix. You deserve better than this. We can take comfort, as Americans, that the Barnum and Bailey's circus finally closed this year; hopefully, we can make this godawful film close prematurely.

I give The Greatest Showman a 0.6 out of 10.