The Greatest Showman: Review

As a movie that spends a heap of its runtime exploring the distinction between authentic and fake, I’m sure The Greatest Showman will appreciate me being in two minds which side of the ring this musical fantasy falls. On the one hand, the film never really managed to trapeze over the initial hurdle of sucking me into its world to the point where I could ignore the thin veneer of verity with regard to historical accuracy. On the other hand, as soon as the first song kicked in, I was shocked to hear some of my fellow cinemagoers singing along with Hugh Jackman’s disneyfied P. T. Barnum. Can a film that induces that kind of enthusiastic joy to be forgiven for taking a few storytelling liberties with exploitation and animal cruelty?

Tarot cards on the table, I can take or leave the film but there’s no denial here that the soundtrack is stellar.

Getting past the initial number is the hardest leap for any musical to accomplish. Getting me to forget my miserable existence in the real world and drawing me into cinematic fantasy is the base from which you build your show. It’s a feat Beauty and the Beast (the only other musical I saw last year) only just pulled off and the reason Elf the Musical made me want to boil my head. The Greatest Showman tries to sneakily open with it’s most extravagant number and, in my opinion, it’s too much, too soon. I can’t go from slipping around on the grey, sodden pavements of Newcastle to watching lions somersault over Zendaya in the space of some trailers.

The singing mostly gels well enough with the fiction of the story but when it doesn’t it’s jarringly noticeable. There’s some very glaring editing choices and CGI that hit like a charging abused elephant. Subplots pop up and disappear with all the narrative balance of wackamole. Apparently, the actor playing Charles Stratton (a performer with dwarfism) delivered all his lines as normal but for whatever reason, the audio is edited in such a way as I had to look it up to see if he’d been dubbed. All this, aside from the sanitising of history, made it impossible to buy a lot of what happened outside of the big song set-pieces.

Speaking of those songs though… yeah admittedly they’re great. Stirring powerful anthems are balanced well against melodic slow mourns. Surely a credit to Benj Pasek and Justin Paul, who wrote the soundtrack, is the fact I looked up the Spotify playlist immediately after leaving the cinema and wrote this review to the songs on a loop. The visual accompaniment to these numbers are usually colourful, extravagant marvels as well. Special recommendation to Jackman and Zac Effron’s turn in a bar which is choreographed with the dazzling frenzy of a frantic juggler.

So at the curtain call, while Jackman, Effron and co. are all charming as ever and the story is serviceable, The Greatest Showman is a slightly shoddy looking branch on which to hang a few glimmering baubles that will stay with you far longer than the connecting tissue holding them together.