The Greatest Showman

This review is going to be less formal than my others. I feel that a subject like this requires more humanity, so I will not refer to myself as “one” to disguise myself as some random audience. I will present my experience as my own.

I was so looking forward to this film, The Greatest Showman. Michael Gracey directs it and one of its screenwriters is Bill Condon, who you will remember as the director of Beauty and the Beast (2017) starring Emma Watson. The film received three nominations at the Golden Globe Awards for its quality of music and for Hugh Jackman’s performance. By the look of the trailer it looked to be a colourful, extravagant and uplifting movie musical. I sat in a small screening room in a big comfortable chair, lay back and beheld as the movie began, knowing nothing of the historical context behind its story.

The opening musical number, “The Greatest Show” got me in the palm of the artists’ hand. The music throughout is amazing. I almost cried a couple of times. The vocals were that beautiful. I found it inspiring and wanted to practice singing the moment I got home. Despite the film’s setting in the early 1800s, the style of music is a lot like the pop, RnB and soul music you’d hear today. We’ve had jazz, musical theatre and rock music in movie musicals before, so hearing original songs in contemporary styles of music in this time setting is something new and fun. The actors are charismatic and invested. The aesthetics, whether in the set, the style or costumes and makeup, are colourful and grand. The film seemed to be edited well enough, except for a single line where Jackman’s voice is not synched up with his lips.

There were a few dents in the story that I saw. For example, Barnum gets a loan for his establishment by deceiving the bank and it doesn’t come back to bite him. He commits an act of fraud and gets away with it. The romance between Zac Efron and Zendaya's characters has no development. Efron thinks Zendaya is hot, they spontaneously hold hands while listening to Jenny Lind (Rebecca Ferguson), they go on a blind date that is interrupted by racial prejudices, and they simply decide they are in love before the crisis of the film. I also found it strange that some characters, including Barnum, referred to his performers’ characters as fake. While he may be referring to his exaggerating some of the characters’ traits in the show, this seems kind of insulting to both the characters and their actors/singers who are giving their all.

The choreography is impressive – flowing and fast-paced, which must have presented a challenge for the camera and editing to keep up with it. At some point I reflected on all this movement, and I got the sense that perhaps I was being distracted from something.

When I got home, instead of practicing my vocals, I wanted to write about this film that had given me so much joy. I did some research on this P. T. Barnum, this so-called Greatest Showman, and what I found made me hate the film.

Let me introduce you to Joice Heth. For those of you who don’t know, Heth was an African-American woman born in Madagascar and held as a slave in Kentucky. In her latter years she had become blind and paralysed, retaining the abilities of speaking and moving her right arm. She was sold to P. T. Barnum, who used a legal loophole to maintain possession of her in New York, where slavery was illegal. There he used her as an attraction in his circus, putting her on display as a 161-year-old former nurse to an infant George Washington, which contributed to Barnum’s success. When confronted with accusations of a hoax about Heth’s age, Barnum announced that she would be autopsied upon her death, and a year later he indeed charged fifteen hundred spectators to see a public autopsy of Joice Heth’s remains after her passing around the age of 79. When the surgeon confirmed that the body was not over 160-years-old, Barnum claimed that Joice Heth was still alive and touring Europe.

The film does not address Joice Heth.

I am outraged. I trusted this film. I trusted it to be a film about the purity of artistic vision and bringing imagination to life. The film takes a deceptive exploitative slave-owner who enforced stereotypes, and represents him as a starry-eyed progressive family man with flare and some vanity issues, whose lack of appreciation for his employees is too easily forgiven.

Many musicals are associated with utopianism, where the bright and happy atmosphere distracts from darker truths. The film is set up as a victory for diversity, acceptance and interracial relationships, which is the complete antithesis of what would have happened in P. T. Barnum’s “freak show”. In an article from The Guardian, writer Steve Rose says, “To really do Barnum’s story justice, they would be better off making a horror movie.” On that matter I’m inclined to agree with him. Seems a horror movie would have been more appropriate than a musical that romanticises a villain.

I have to ask, did no one in the creation of this film know about all this? Did no one on set know? I found out about Joice Heth after only a quick Google search. With all the resources at their disposal, the filmmakers either didn’t bother to research the guy they were making this film about, or they opted to ignore Barnum’s maliciousness so they could make a movie musical. What about Zendaya or Yahya Abdul-Mateen II? Call me presumptuous, but I can only imagine that if they knew the history behind P. T. Barnum and what he did to Joice Heth, they might not have accepted their roles in this film, especially seeing that the film represents Barnum in a sympathetic light and their characters are portrayed as his friends. I can imagine a lot of these actors would have turned down these roles under these circumstances, not just the ones of African-American ancestry. Perhaps I'm being naïve. Perhaps there were other factors in taking these roles even if the actors knew about what Barnum did. Even still, if you're an actor in this film and you know about all this, wouldn't you feel conflicted about it?

The film deceives the common moviegoer. It insults the people who were shunned by society and exploited by Barnum. It exploits the demographics it claims to champion. It betrays its performers, who behind their beaming smiles, enjoyment of the art forms and enjoyment of their involvement in this project have been hoodwinked into romanticising a monster.

In the film, there is a critic character that consistently expresses dislike for Barnum’s show. While the critic is not represented as a nitpicky one-dimensional antagonist, I wondered why they needed to shun criticism if the film was so well made. However, there is a line of dialogue from him that bothers me (which I will quote to the best of my memory).

“I never liked your show. I wouldn’t call it art. But bringing together people of different colours, all shapes and sizes… Another critic might have called it a celebration of humanity.”

Aside from how on-the-nose and disrespectful to historical context that line was, what I deduce from it is Gracey, Condon and Jenny Bicks are trying to say diversity and political correctness in film is more important than the quality of the film and the skill of the filmmaker and/or storyteller. Far be it from me to object to diversity in this film given its setting and premise, dismissing criticism like this is a terrible attitude for an artist to have. The best way to promote diversity in a film is to apply outstanding skill and consideration in both making said film and telling the story. While I have no wish to criticise the film aesthetically or musically, the story is far from flawless. The dwarf, the bearded lady and other characters in the circus may come off like they’re empowered, but the fact is Barnum shrugs them off as sideshows, but is forgiven due to the fact that he brought them together (for his own profit, by the way), never owning up to his shortcomings.

And this is a recurring problem with the writing. There is no conflict. Any time a problem arises – whether it's Barnum needing money, the romance between the young lovers, Barnum's marital issues, or the treatment of his employees – it is almost immediately hand-waved away, usually with little more than a positive attitude or someone who can bail them out. What incentive does the audience have to get invested? Why should we worry whether or not things are going to work out if the writer's solutions are so easy that it's virtually impossible for them to lose?

I’ve seen this so many times where artists of some description, no matter how skilled or unskilled, put themselves in a bubble because they believe only the artist matters. Allow me to quote one of my favourite critics on the Internet:

“Everyone who buys a comic, a movie, a game – they’re critics. The phrase “everybody’s a critic” is used to try to brush off criticism, but it’s the truth… Customers are critics because it’s our money to spend and our voice to be heard. We speak out not for its own sake, but to hope that the next thing that comes along is better.” (Lewis Lovhaug, Spider-Man: One More Day, Part 2 – Atop the Fourth Wall)

I’m of the firm opinion that creativity and logic, imagination and criticism, sentiment and skill, innovation and convention, chaos and order, are complimentary to each other. There’s a reason we’re not born with only the left or right hemispheres of our brain. To be an artist is to be a critic. When I’m writing a script, when I’m committing to it, I am constantly criticising my own work, constantly second-guessing myself. There's so much to consider. We learn from the feedback that our audiences give us, and we learn from our mistakes. To brush off criticism is to perpetuate one’s ignorance. If you are an artist, no matter how lowly or successful, please take heed of that.

The Greatest Showman is exploitative – it exploits its audience by appealing to their sentiment of progressiveness and through dazzling effects and performances, almost as if it were designed to blow you away to distract you. The film may take note of Barnum's achievement in entertainment, but it ignores the damning ways in which he achieved, which were in no way socially progressive. The people who wanted to tell this story should have thought more about the choices they made in representing historical figures. If Barnum hadn’t been portrayed so sympathetically, if the historical context and horrors of his work had been addressed, if he hadn’t gotten off so easy – or (should the filmmakers want to keep the tone they had intended) if this were a purely fictional story instead of one glamorising historical figures – this film could have been much truer than it turned out.

I wanted to love this film. I truly did.