PT Barnum, once an apprentice to his tailor-father, is recruiting for an enterprise he calls a museum of oddities. Exotic women, social misfits with physical deformities, and people of all shapes, sizes and races line up to seek on the stage the validation that is missing from their lives. A very portly man tells Barnum (Hugh Jackman) how heavy he is. The future impresario instantly adds several kilos to the man’s weight.
Hyperbole (or “humbug” as he calls it) is the key to making it in show business, Barnum believes, and audiences pay good money to be knowingly hoodwinked. Before Hollywood was the circus – Michael Gracey’s musical The Greatest Showman makes this point well.
The politically correct screenplay, by Jenny Bicks and Bill Condon (Chicago), presents the nineteenth-century entertainer as an early champion of diversity and tolerance. The musical crunches Barnum’s extraordinarily busy life (which included stints in politics and civic improvement) into a handful of conveniently fictionalised incidents. These include Barnum’s hardscrabble childhood, his wooing of and eventual marriage to the wealthier Charity (Michelle Williams), and his craving for social acceptance.
His first step towards the beau monde is his presentation to American audiences of Swedish singing sensation Jenny Lind (Rebecca Ferguson). The black-tie crowds throng her performances, but Barnum’s success takes him away from the bearded Lettie (Keala Settle), the dwarf Charles (Charles Stratton), the black acrobat Anne (Zendaya) and the other so-called freaks who really bring in the money. However, just like polite society has shunned these human curiosities, the movie also skitters over their lives as performers. In a movie dedicated to the showman of the title, only Lettie and Anne get play. If you’re looking for a poignant depiction of circus people, there is more of it in the five-minute music video for the Red Hot Chili Peppers song Soul to Squeeze from 2011 than in this 105-minute movie.
However, Barnum’s success in organising unmatched stage spectacles barely comes through because of the artifice inherent in the musical format and the contemporary editing and shooting styles – fast cuts, rapid camerawork, music video-style stagings of songs. The compression of time makes it appear that the rush of events is taking place over only a few months (Barnum’s daughters barely age, for instance). Perhaps Barnum was bluffing, after all.
That said, the movie is held together by a superb central performance by Jackson, who embodies Barnum’s can-do spirit and seething social aspirations, and the music by John Debney and John Trapnese. The composers pack the movie with several memorable melodies, among which Rewrite the Stars, which depicts the forbidden love between the mixed-race couple Anne and Carlyle, is outstanding.
