Review: “The Greatest Showman” (2017)
I’m starting a film blog. What’s the first one to review?
There’s a lot of backlash against this baby, so I figure it’s best to start on a high note. And boy what a high note. I mean, Hugh Jackman does this thing where the whole of everybody else will be singing and suddenly he’s matching harmony with them, right? And then your jaw drops and you get these pleasant little ASMR tingles as his voice soars a note above that, then two, the three, and then suddenly the whole top range of your hearing is this glorious melange of choral pop arrangement and Jackman giving a performance that he sinks into like someone saved his life, he howls with so much passion.
A fair number of reviewers are wont to call this particular film out on the basis that it’s historically inaccurate. Fair point. Barnum was not this sort of happy noble showman who liked to do hip-hop dancing and be chaste with women and who treated the differently abled in his care with grace. Also the two do not look alike at all.
The one on the left is a little ugly man who looks like a cross between Henry Travers and a toad. The other is P.T. Barnum, an exquisite movie creation of Jenny Bicks (Sex and The City) and Bill Condon (Gods and Monsters, the last two Twilight films, and Beauty and The Beast). The two have almost no relation to each other and that is where, contrary to the bloggers, the movie blossoms into it’s own. The poppy score concocted by composer wunderkinds Pasek and Paul (of Dear Evan Hansen and La La Land), derided by some baffled reviewers as sort of Fall Out Boy-lite, forms a kind of ecstatic contrast between the Old Hollywood fakiness of mid-1800s New York and the whole thing blossoms into anachronism and fantasy. This is no more a biopic than Lord of the Rings.
Much attention too has been paid to the direction of first timer Michael Gracey, he of the ubiquitous beanie hat. Apparently it’s true that Jackman, who had been trying to get a musical project off the ground for years, handpicked Gracey after a Lipton commercial he directed Jackman in. While this could provoke snobbery, I find I have three reactions to this. 1.) That must have been a hell of a pleasurable Lipton commercial to shoot, 2.) Jackman was clearly looking for his dessert after an extended dinner of X-Men and who couldn’t blame him, and most importantly 3.) There’s something of Michel Gondry or Spike Jonze in this origin. Gracey also, like them, did music videos and clearly brings that exquisite, hyperkinetic aesthetic to this project. There’s something wonderfully slippery and fluid about his blocking, like the movie is pure water sliding under our fingers. At the very least he’s undeniably good at the dance sequences. Hand in hand with underrated cinematographer Seamus McGarvey, he creates these sweeping, almost luridly pretty tableaus of dance and movement as well as painterly images of the non-singing scenes. There is also something gloriously old-fasioned about their work. In the surreal rooftop ballet of “A Million Dreams,” Jackman and an effervescent Michelle Williams perform a gorgeous ballet against some of the most blindingly unrealistic matte paintings of the last ten years. And the Impressionistic quality of it takes your breath away.
This is a movie seemingly designed to do that to your lungs on the regular, however. If you let yourself fall face first into it’s pillowy feel good wonderland and surrender to it’s conditions, the movie presents you with images of cinematic beauty that are unseen or else unexplored in other films of 2017. A scarf flapping in the breeze, Zendaya backlit on a hoop, a subtly multicolored New York cityscape, a devastating cut from a closeup to a wide shot, hammers pounding to the beat, vivid purple flowers, Loren Allred’s dubbing, the hookiest title sequence in recent memory, Keala Settle’s transcendent gospel roar.
An optimistic movie musical is designed as pure escapism, a kind of throwback, and it’s sad considering the pleasures of this one were ignored by a reviewing mass all too quick to lionize the classic cinema this pays homage to. However, considering the film’s darkhorse standing at the box office, it seems audiences understand the bill of fare, and keep returning again and again to it. There’s so much in this movie I could go on for paragraphs and paragraphs about. About how the script has surprisingly insightful things to say about class in America despite an (admitted) weakness concerning character development, about how this marks the final stage in Zac Efron’s maturity, about how the six man editing team deserved an Oscar nod, about how it forms a unique counterpoint to Cy Coleman’s 1980 musical Barnum, about the film’s timely diversity “happy-pandering,” or about how the parallels between the film’s critics and the dialogue of the movie’s theater critic character is an odd bit of cosmic ephemeralia.
But I won’t.
What I recommend you see this movie for is simply to find yourself lost in images and sound and movement and sappy happiness again. This is pure eye and ear candy. Cinema at its most concrete, simple pleasures. Hugh Jackman’s golden voice, finally back at its Broadway origins, worms its way into your ear canal, pouring down into your synapses half liquid and half gas. It is flowing deeper into your pleasure centers until the combined effect is the slap in the face of ecstasy and joy and the tears start pouring down your face at what you are watching. The effect of surrendering to The Greatest Showman is like returning to childhood again, when the pretty images on the screen made you rewind the videotape over and over and over and over.
10/10 (Would highly recommend you go and see with an open mind.)
