by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2019 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Two nights ago I watched a semi-private screening of The
Greatest Showman, a 2017 musical biopic of
the legendary 19th century show-business entrepreneur Phineas T.
Barnum (Hugh Jackman) which, ironically, hit the screens the same year that the
real-life Ringling Bros., Barnum and Bailey Circus went out of business,
plagued by ill attendance, continuing controversies over their treatment of
animals, and the rise of Cirque du Soleil and its imitators, which dispensed
with animals and focused on human gymnastics and acrobatics. Doing P. T.
Barnum’s life as a musical wasn’t a new idea: there’d been at least two stage
versions before, including one that ran briefly on Broadway in 1931 called Ballyhoo and starred the actor who might have been
made to play Barnum, W. C. Fields. (It’s
unfortunate that Ballyhoo wasn’t
filmed during Fields’ odd late-in-life period of movie stardom from 1932 to
1941 — though I’ve long maintained in these pages that the real tragedy of Fields’ life is that no one thought of
casting him in a film as Shakespeare’s Sir John Falstaff, a character from 300
years before Fields’ life that eerily anticipated his comic persona.) The next attempt was a 1982 Broadway musical
called Barnum, featuring two cast
members, Marianne Tatum and Leonard Crofoot, who are “background actors” (i.e.,
extras) in The Greatest Showman.
Not surprisingly, the film’s script by Jenny Bicks and Bill Condon (the latter
might have made a better director for the project than the actual one, Michael
Gracey, yet another music-video veteran making his first full-length feature)
considerably whitewashed Barnum, depicting him as a young, penniless
man-on-the-make who even when he’s a boy (and played by Ellis Rubin) had a
seemingly hopeless crush on a rich girl, Charity (Skylar Dunn as a kid,
Michelle Williams grown-up), whose parents can’t stand the idea of her dating
or, worse yet, marrying so far “down.” Nonetheless, Charity runs off with
Barnum, believing in his promises that somehow he’ll find a way to make them a
fortune. One jump-cut later they have two kids, daughters Caroline (Austyn
Johnson) and Helen (Cameron Seely), and Barnum is making ends meet — barely —
when the shipping company he’s been working for as an accountant goes under
after all 12 of its vessels are sunk by a typhoon in the South China Sea.
Barnum looks for a new venture and decides to open a wax museum — he’s heard
they’re “all the rage in Europe” — called P. T. Barnum’s American Museum. He
hoodwinks a banker into giving him a loan for startup costs by offering as
collateral the deed to those 12 ships that are currently resting at the bottom
of the South China Sea, and the museum duly opens — and flops big-time.
Desperate, Barnum grabs hold of a suggestion made by one of his daughters that
“you have too many dead things in your museum” and starts exhibiting freaks,
including the little person Tom Thumb (Sam Humphrey, who’s genuinely little —
4’ 2” — but was made even littler in the film with the old trick José Ferrer
used in the 1952 Moulin Rouge,
going about on his knees with shoes fastened to them and the lower half of his
legs kept off camera), bearded lady Lettie Lutz (Keala Settle, who in real life
isn’t bearded but is incredibly
huge and has a rich, stunning voice, the best of anyone in the cast — a biopic
of Kate Smith, anyone? Or, as I suggested in my moviemagg post on the 2018
Academy Awards, “Mama” Cass Elliott?), Siamese twins Chang (Yusaku Komori) and
Eng (Danial Son) — since they were actually from Siam (modern-day Thailand),
Barnum coined the term “Siamese Twins” for conjoined twins, and it stuck — as
well as a Black aerialist and other circus performers. The show soon outgrows
the American Museum and, struck by the insulting review by drama critic James
Gordon Bennett (Paul Sparks) that his shows resemble a circus, he builds a new
building and calls it “P. T. Barnum’s Circus.” The movie Barnum is driven by a
desire to show up his in-laws and one-up them, including buying a huge house in
the same neighborhood to rub it in their faces that he now has just as much
money as they do. With a business partner he’s picked up, well-to-do playwright
Phillip Carlyle (Zac Efron, in one of the few performances he’s given in which
he’s been required to do more than just stand around and look cute), Barnum
lands the world’s most famous opera singer, Jenny Lind (Rebecca Ferguson) and
presents her on a concert tour of the U.S., where she’s never performed before
— only Lind attempts to seduce Barnum and when he, out of loyalty to his wife,
turns her down, she angrily quits the tour after staging a public scene to make
it look like she’s having an affair with him anyway.
Meanwhile, back in New
York, an angry proletarian mob stages a riot outside the circus theatre and one
of them trips over a lantern and burns the place down. Barnum is seemingly
ruined, but he’s bailed out by Carlyle, who’s been saving his 10 percent cut of
Barnum’s enterprise and uses it to launch a new venture, a circus tent with
some of the same performers, only now as a 50-50 partner. The
Greatest Showman is a frustrating movie,
with some genuinely moving moments and a real sense of pathos — like everyone
who’s made a movie about circus freaks (including director Tod Browning and
writer Tod Robbins in MGM’s truly weird 1932 Freaks) the filmmakers are trying to steer the thin line
between sympathy for the freaks and exploitation of them (though none of the
cast members of The Greatest Showman
were that “freaky” — the tattooed man in Barnum’s show is played by an actor who
has no tattoos at all and wore a body suit to simulate them), and though they
don’t always succeed the freaks’ split attitudes towards Barnum, greatful to
him for giving them a chance to make a decent living while at the same time
suspicious that he regards them just
as commodities and doesn’t give a damn about them as people, are vividly
dramatized and become a major issue in the plot. The big scene occurs when
Barnum presents Jenny Lind’s debut concert in New York and hosts a post-concert
reception in which he lords it over all the Manhattan “swells” that he,
lower-class impresario of circus freaks, has brought the world’s greatest
singer to the U.S. so they can hear her — and the freaks, resentful that Barnum
hasn’t invited them to his big
reception, crash it and sing the show’s most powerful song, “This Is Me.” (I’d
love to hear this adopted as a Queer pride anthem; it’s a much better song than “I Am What I Am” from La
Cage aux Folles and more “anthemic” than
Lady Gaga’s “Born This Way.”)
“This Is Me” was nominated for the Academy Award
for Best Song but lost to an anodyne ditty from a Disney-Pixar movie, “Remember
Me” (though it also had competition from Mary J. Blige’s “Mighty River” from
the film Mudbound), and though
it’s a great song it also highlights the biggest problem with The
Greatest Showman: all its songs sound too
much alike. They were all written by Benj Pasek and Justin Paul, who also did
the songs for La La Land (another
modern-day musical with one standout song, “Audition,” in an otherwise
serviceable but not great score), and all of them are big, expansive power ballads with lyrics about reaching
for your dreams and never letting adversity stand in your way. Individually
they might be powerful and emotional, but collectively you start to groan after
a while, “Oh, no, not another big
‘inspirational’ song.” The “trivia” section on imdb.com’s page on The
Greatest Showman quotes Pasek as saying the
decision to use modern-style music instead of attempting to evoke the music
actually popular in the mid-19th century was made “to express not
just the characters’ feelings, but also how ahead of his time P.T. Barnum was.
He wasn’t bound by the world in which he lived; he wanted to create one.”
Translation: “We wanted songs that sounded like modern pop so people would buy
the soundtrack CD.” The songs are actually more or less appropriate for the
dramatic situations except when
Jenny Lind makes her long-awaited New York debut and, instead of singing an
operatic aria of the kind the real Lind would have sung, she belts out yet
another big Pasek-Paul power ballad, “Never Enough,” sung by Loren Allred as
Rebecca Ferguson’s voice double. The song is not only wrong dramatically, it
loses the entire plot point — that Barnum, impresario for the common people, is
going way out of his depth
presenting an opera singer to an upper-class audience and he’s going to ruin
himself in the process. (This is also a key plot point in classic-era Fox
musicals like Dante’s Inferno, King of Burlesque and Hello, Frisco, Hello, in which a lower-class person rises to fame and
fortune running popular theatres and then loses it all going after the
upper-class trade.)
The Greatest Showman is that most frustrating sort of movie, a good film that could have
been great — though one of the biggest challenges was casting the title role:
P. T. Barnum was such a larger-than-life figure only a larger-than-life actor could really play him
(about the only actor I can think of since W. C. Fields who would have worked
in the part would have been Robin Williams in his prime), and as wonderful as
it is to see Hugh Jackman in a part where he doesn’t have claws, and as well as
he sings and dances, no one is ever going to hail him as one of the comic
geniuses of our time. (I still
think Jackman gave his greatest performance on film in a movie almost no one
saw: Baz Luhrmann’s 2009 Australia.)
The other cast members are personable, though Michelle Williams has little to
do as the typical long-suffering wife and the actors playing freaks (aside from
Keala Settle and Sam Humphrey, who do get chances to create indelible characters) pretty much let their
makeup and costuming do their acting for them. I liked The Greatest
Showman but I wanted to like it better than
I did; in an era in which the President of the United States is a Barnumesque
con artist, one might expect a film about Barnum to capture more of why so many of the American people fell for his hype and
what they got out of his shows.
