The Musical About The Evil Conman Is Trash...Surprise I Guess

Now I’m not going to pretend this movie has nothing going for it. When I saw it first I expected to despise yet found myself enjoying certain moments and specifically the energy of the film. It really showcases that the movie musical is being resurrected, La La Land was the beginning of this and was obviously testing the waters with lower energy songs that fit the more low stakes drama feel of that film but now, we have The Greatest Showman to show studios that you can make a big high energy, cheese fest of a musical and people will go and see it. I truly admire this film for how it completely destroyed expectations and became so successful to everyone’s shock. The problem is it just isn’t very good.

The second time I saw the film, I made sure to go in with no expectations. This time I saw the cracks even in the parts I enjoyed. Even if I had ignored the blatant revising of Barnum’s monstrosity and the demonising of Jenny Lind (more on that later), the film never really has any arc for anyone, just from a narrative stand point it’s flawed. Let’s begin with the big guns, P.T Barnum. He has no arc. They pretend he does by showing him lose everything and then come together with his “friends” and save the circus but he doesn’t ever actually learn anything. The glossing over of the majority of Barnum’s flaws means that there’s nothing for the movie to pretend he learned or overcame in himself. I know that in real life Barnum never learnt his lesson but it’s not like they feel tied down by the history since they make Barnum seem like a really great guy the whole time when in reality he exploited the disabled, abused animals, neglected his family through it all (which is kind of shown but not really), owned a slave, committed fraud several times and conned countless people and did all this for his whole life, never learning or changing. If you’re going to ignore history to make a more compelling narrative at least give the lead character an arc of some kind. This narrative problem effects other characters too, for example, the romantic subplot between Zendaya and Zac Efron never really develops at all, it jumps from the beginning, skips any build up and then jumps to the next step. We’re given a moment where they look at each other in a way that suggests some kind of attraction, then the next time we see them together they’re basically breaking up, having never really gotten together. We’re not given the chance to care about them because stuff just happens to them with no work being done to actually show us the development of their relationship between problems and resolutions. Furthermore, these characters didn’t even exist in real life so why on earth are they given so much focus on such a forced manner? That could’ve been valuable time given to the “freaks” to turn them into actual characters. We should have been following the “freaks” in this film. Rather than turning Barnum into a hero or creating a good looking couple for us to focus on, we should’ve been focusing on the stars of the show. They’re the ones that have the actual hardships to overcome and the interesting relationships to explore. Tom Thumb and Barnum’s relationship would have been so great to see even the slightest glimpse of but the “freaks” relegated to simply overblown extras. None of them get any real story, they pretend that they overcome something somewhere along the line when the bust into a song about how they’ve learned to accept themselves but this is undermined by the fact that they seem to fluctuate throughout the whole film in this sense. The song isn’t particularly my cup of tea but it was super high energy and would’ve had an impact on me as viewer if it had any actual weight to it in the story. There’s a critic character in the film too, an obvious attempt by the filmmakers to invalidate any criticism by claiming that the critics are just like the stuck up one in the film that, if the film was historically accurate, wouldn’t have been stuck up, he would’ve been correct. This manipulation isn’t solely found here though, the film is manipulative at its core. Every song is manipulating the audience to feel an emotion for the characters that the writing has not earned. It uses the “freaks” in the same way Barnum does, as something to stare at, they are a backdrop for a story about romanticising an awful man. It gives you the beginning and the ends of story arcs in an attempt to make it seem as though the characters have learned something when they haven’t because there was no middle to their story for them to do so in. But it’s not just bad in a narrative sense, it’s kind of unintentionally misogynistic. Jenny Lind was an absolute legend, she was a world renowned opera singer who used the money from her tour with Barnum to open a music school for girls and never had an affair with Barnum. The film paints her as a home wrecker who was in love with the great man that was P.T Barnum and kissed him on stage out of spite. This is the most disgusting injustice in the film, to claim that Barnum is a hero of show business and that Jenny Lind was some kind of spiteful, emotionally unstable wreck is awful. Sure, perhaps people shouldn’t take the word of a cheesy musical as gospel but there will always be people who don’t look past the “based on a true story” loophole that biopics use and will think this is what happened. The filmmakers have essentially sacrificed the public perception of an awesome woman to put a horrible man on a pedestal. It may not be intentionally so but this smells like misogyny to me. I was worried about expressing these thoughts on the internet considering how many people love this movie, including close friends of mine who usually have quite good taste. I’d hate to offend anyone who likes this movie so I’ll just advise those who do to perhaps take a moment to think about what I’ve pointed out about it, rewatch it with this review in mind and see if you still do. If you do, great, everyone’s got to love at least one trash film. If not, even better because this film is trash and has no teeth.