The Greatest Showman (2017)

The Greatest Showman (2017)

IMDB Rating : 8.0 /10 ( as on 09.01.2018)

PG | 1h 45min | Biography, Drama, Musical

Orphaned, penniless but ambitious and with a mind crammed with imagination and fresh ideas, the American Phineas Taylor Barnum will always be remembered as the man with the gift to effortlessly blur the line between reality and fiction. Thirsty for innovation and hungry for success, the son of a tailor will manage to open a wax museum but will soon shift focus to the unique and peculiar, introducing extraordinary, never-seen-before live acts on the circus stage. Some will call Barnum's wide collection of oddities, a freak show; however, when the obsessed for cheers and respectability showman gambles everything on the opera singer Jenny Lind to appeal to a high-brow audience, he will somehow lose sight of the most important aspect of his life: his family. Will Barnum risk it all to be accepted?

Director: Michael Gracey

Writers: Jenny Bicks (screenplay by), Bill Condon (screenplay by)

Stars: Hugh Jackman, Michelle Williams, Zac Efron

IMDB link Here

Movie Rating ★★★☆☆  

 Hugh Jackman puts on a show in cheesy, charming musical

Peter Bradshaw

Hugh Jackman is at his most relatable here in this cheerful fantasy musical, so mainstream it is at the exact centre of the road as if placed there by some impossibly sophisticated scientific implement. The film succeeds in being cheesy and sugary at the same time, and is very loosely based on the life of the legendary showman and inveterate crowd-pleaser Phineas T Barnum, the man who in the 19th century possibly invented entertainment as we know it today.

Another type of movie might seek to draw parallels between the cheeky impresario Barnum – frantically promoting fake or at any rate unreliable news about giants, bearded ladies etc – and another questionable American celebrity of the present day. But this is a Barnum we can all get behind. He’s an entrepreneur, a dreamer, a family man, an idealist, an underdog, a proto-modern evangelist for diversity (he has circus turns of all shapes and sizes) and he’s someone for whom the template for conventional white body image is not the be-all and end-all.

Barnum’s career is interestingly depicted as something which shows how showbusiness moved from the margins to the mainstream: from a wacky circus tent to something at the very centre of American life. Here is the rackety and cheerfully disreputable vaudeville from which Barnum made his fortune: the macabre wax figures of historical figures and exotic stuffed animals, the cabinet of strange curiosities, the human freaks whose backgrounds and anatomical achievements he may have exaggerated just a trifle. And then we had the live-action circus acts that he tried next.

It’s a movie which in some ways resembles Baz Luhrmann’s Moulin Rouge from 2001: a celebratory and euphoric entertainment which is not overly concerned with dramatic or psychological consistency. It is all about the mood, the feel, the general sugar rush of euphoria. I can imagine the same treatment being given to the early career of the great theatrical magician Orson Welles.

And Hugh Jackman is absolutely the right casting for this figure – at least as he is imagined here. A less starry-eyed dramatisation might give the role to Paul Giamatti or Toby Jones. At any rate, Jackman gives this the muscular heft that it needs. He has the musical theatre chops and the film pizazz to sell it; he is approachably handsome and his singing voice is light, pleasant, yet strong and competent. It’s not a film to break moulds or test boundaries. Yet Jackman’s real charm will carry you along.

 Read complete review at The guardian

David Rooney

The sawdust and sequins are laid on thick, the period flashbulbs pop and the champagne flows in The Greatest Showman, yet this ersatz portrait of American big-top tent impresario P.T. Barnum is all smoke and mirrors, no substance. It hammers pedestrian themes of family, friendship and inclusivity while neglecting the fundaments of character and story. First-time director Michael Gracey exposes his roots in commercials and music videos by shaping a movie musical whose references go no further back than Baz Luhrmann. And despite a cast of proven vocalists led with his customary gusto by Hugh Jackman, the interchangeably generic pop songs are so numbingly overproduced they all sound like they're being performed off-camera.

First, a word about the music: The songs are by Benj Pasek and Justin Paul, a fast-rising team who wrote lyrics for the tunes in La La Land; they composed the charmingly retro score for the musical adaptation of A Christmas Story and penned the affecting emo balladry in the Tony-winning Broadway smash, Dear Evan Hansen. Clearly, these guys can write, and in a variety of genres.

The mandate of Pasek and Paul with this long-gestating project, however, appears to have been to come up with accessible pop songs that drag the mid-19th-century story into the here and now. One number after another follows the same derivative template — from the hushed start through the first wave of emphatic instrumentation, building into an all-out explosion of triumphal, extra-loud chorus expressing minor variations on standard-issue themes of self-affirmation. They all sound like bland imitations of chart hits by Katy Perry or Demi Lovato or Kelly Clarkson. Catchy, like Chlamydia.

What the personality-free songs seldom do though is advance the story or deepen our connection to the characters, which means they fail in the most basic job requirement of musical numbers. I started actively dreading the arrival of another song, never a good feeling in a movie musical.

Scripted by veteran TV writer Jenny Bicks (Sex and the City) and Bill Condon from a story by Bicks, the movie opens with a hint of Great Expectations. The cheeky young Phineas (Ellis Rubin) accompanies his tailor father (Will Swenson) to the palatial home of well-heeled client Mr. Hallett (Fredric Lehne), a joyless snob who doesn't take kindly to the lowly tradesman's boy flirting with his precious daughter Charity (Skylar Dunn).

This being a musical unshackled from its time period, Jenny of course sings yearning power pop with the same processed, disconnected sound as everyone else. Nonetheless, she brings tears to Barnum's eyes and earns Bennett's respect. And this being a family film without even a flicker of sexual tension, the interactions of Phineas and Jenny while on tour remain quite chaste, despite the "Swedish Nightingale" declaring her love for him.

The fact that none of this ever acquires much dramatic urgency, even when the circus is torched and lives hang in the balance, is no fault of the cast. The actors do what they can with roles that are barely more than outlines and pre-programmed character arcs. The busy presence of six credited editors might also have something to do with it, suggesting that the story has been cut to ribbons in favor of the assaultive song-and-dance interludes.

Jackman seems incapable of giving an unappealing performance, but there's just no texture to his role. Barnum early on owns the label "Prince of Humbugs," literally wearing it on a hat, which indicates the real subject's renown for hype and fakery. But the worst we see him do is pad an already corpulent man to make him larger, or put a massively tall guy on stilts to, ahem, heighten the effect. The script so sanitizes and simplifies the flamboyant showman that you wonder how anyone could possibly object to what he's selling.

Ferguson has a tender moment or two, but the roles of Williams and Efron are on the thin side. Of the secondary characters, Zendaya registers strongest, bringing touching sensitivity to her handful of scenes, and looking fabulous in her pink performance wig. Broadway recruit Settle, with her leather lungs, also makes the most of her screen time, leading a big anthemic number about celebrating your uniqueness called "This is Me," which is basically "I Am What I Am" and "Born This Way" put through a blender.

Director Gracey, cinematographer Seamus McGarvey, production designer Nathan Crowley and costumer Ellen Mirojnick douse everything in such a sparkly modern gloss that the historical locations might as well be studio sets and the story of an American showbiz pioneer becomes just another razzle-dazzle cliche. This is a movie that works way too hard at its magic, continually prompting us with insistent music cues to feel excitement that just isn't there. If P.T. Barnum had delivered entertainment this flat to his public, the name would have long been forgotten.

 Read complete review at Hollywood reporter