Plot twists, usually at the end of the second act, are Marvel Studios' regular stock-in-trade nowadays, but three out of their last four movies have had relatively mild revelations. The "bombshell" that the villain Erik Killmonger was, in fact, the son of T'Challa's brother N'Jobu and therefore a legitimate heir to the throne was telegraphed pretty early on, though the revelation that N'Jobu's betrayal was motivated by his desire to fight for oppressed people of African descent everywhere gave the movie a very interesting new complexion. It meant that Erik Killmonger was less like Hela from Thor: Ragnarok and more like Magneto from the X-Men films. And the question posed was a valid one: why couldn't Wakanda lend its technology to oppressed black people the world over to help them improve their lot in life?
When T'Challa learns of Killmonger's existence, he comes face-to-face with the fallout of Wakanda's millennia-old policy of shutting out the outside world, and has a couple of really difficult choices to make. It's not unlike the opposing viewpoints of Charles Xavier and Magneto, which in turn were based on the opposing views of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Malcolm X. Killmonger may have had his methodology wrong, but he asked the right questions: given that there are 2 billion black people all over the world suffering in poverty and subjugation, why is Wakanda standing by and doing nothing? Killmonger is of the Magneto persuasion, whereas T'Challa is more like Xavier, and for some reason, his solution to the problem he faced felt more satisfactory than Xavier's even though they're arguably similar approaches.
One thing about the "twist" that really gratified me was how T'Challa was able to confront T'Chaka for both his duplicity and his cruel abandonment of N'Jobu's son, who grew up to be the murderous Killmonger. This scratched a major itch for me as an MCU geek, because quite frankly I was really disappointed that Odin never had to face the backlash of his decision to conceal from Thor the fact that he had an evil, super-powerful older sister. Like T'Chaka does to T'Challa, Odin appears to Thor from beyond the dead, but unlike T'Challa, Thor basically begs Odin for help instead of calling him out for being a lying SOB. In his final afterlife vision, T'Challa really lets T'Chaka, and all of his ancestors have it for their selfishness, and the film is that much richer for it. There was something cathartic about that moment somehow.
Father issues, like story twists, are another staple of the MCU, whether it's Tony Stark's love/hate relationship with his dad, Thor's constant insecurity about living up to his father, or even Peter Quill's finding out that his dad is basically a god-like megalomaniac, and T'Challa, of the lot of them, did, for me at least, the best job of confronting his issues head on, though it probably helped that his relationship with his father was the least dysfunctional.
Speaking of fathers and sons, I'd like to take the time to heap even more praise on Sterling K. Brown's portrayal of the doomed Wakandan prince N'Jobu. I quite like how Coogler used a well-worn Marvel trope, i.e. the plot twist in a very different way. It's established early on that N'Jobu has betrayed Wakanda, but by saving the revelation of why he did it for much later in the film, Coogler gives that scene that much more emotional impact. One of my favorite sequences in the film is Killmonger's visit to the ancestral plane, where he speaks to his father. It was a heartrending, powerful bit of storytelling quite unlike anything I'd ever seen in a superhero movie.
Of course, the appearance of Bucky Barnes in the final post-credits scene did not exactly come as a surprise considering that it was in Wakanda where he voluntarily went into deep freeze at the end of Captain America: Civil War and considering further that he shows up, alongside a Wakandan army, in the Avengers: Infinity War trailer, but it was nice to see that the Wakandan way of healing his battered soul doesn't just consist of keeping him in a lab.
In truth, there's so much to unpack from this movie, which is shaping up to be an even bigger cultural phenomenon than Wonder Woman was last year, but these are the points that stuck with me the most. Oh, and I was happy that, unlike Woman Woman, with its ultra-generic climax, complete with her unbelievably corny "I believe in love" line, Black Panther actually managed to stick the landing.
Saturday, February 17, 2018
Friday, February 16, 2018
Seismic: A Review of Black Panther
directed by Ryan Coogler
written by Ryan Coogler and Joe Robert Cole
It's hard to review Marvel Studios' latest cinematic offering The Black Panther without bearing in mind the storm of publicity it's generated for the last few weeks, but I am going to give it the old college try.
Following the violent death of his father King T'Chaka (John Kani) in Captain America: Civil War, Prince T'Challa (Chadwick Boseman), must now assume the throne of the sovereign African nation of Wakanda, the most technologically-advanced society in the world. T'Challa assumes a great burden considering that, as advanced as Wakanda may be, it has kept its secrets hidden from the world for thousands of years, masquerading as yet another impoverished African nation while keeping its scientific advancements and its deposit of the highly valuable and unique metal, Vibranium to itself. With the throne, therefore, T'Challa must therefore safeguard Wakanda and its technology, the development of which is overseen by his younger sister, the prodigy Shuri (Letitia Wright). He will rely on the counsel of the elders, of Okoye (Danai Gurira), the general of his military, the Dora Milaje, and his old friend W'Kabi (Daniel Kaluuya). In contrast, though, one of Wakanda's spies and T'Challa's ex-lover Nakai (Lupita Nyong'o) disagrees with Wakanda's millennia-old policy of keeping to itself, having seen the misery in the rest of the world, and feels there is much they can do to help.
Only one man from the outside, Ulysses Klaue (Andy Serkis) has been able to steal Vibranium from Wakanda, which he was only able to do with inside help from no less than T'Chaka's brother N'Jobu (Sterling K. Brown) several years ago. With the death of T'Chaka, Klaue surfaces again for the first time in thirty years, this time allied with the mysterious Erik (Michael B. Jordan) who has terrifying plans for Wakanda and its technology. T'Challa brings Okoye and Nakai along to stop Klaue from selling (newly) stolen Vibranium in South Korea, but things go awry, and when long-held secrets are revealed, even the mighty Black Panther may not be prepared for what's coming.
After they basically revolutionized cinematic storytelling by pioneering the concept of the cinematic universe, Disney's Marvel Studios has been repeatedly criticized for playing it "safe," by adhering to specific narrative tropes, and while I respectfully disagree with it overall, this criticism isn't entirely without basis. One particular trope I agree with was that the persons of color in their movies, whether it was Don Cheadle's James Rhodes in Iron Man, Idris Elba's Heimdall in Thor, Anthony Mackie's Falcon in Captain America, Chiwetel Ejiofor's Mordo in Doctor Strange or Jacob Batalon's Ned in Spider-Man, were invariably portrayed as sidekicks to the white protagonist. It was getting downright embarrassing, especially after rival Warner Brothers/DC came out with the risible Suicide Squad, a film that featured African-American superstar Will Smith in the lead role, albeit as a bad guy turned good. With Black Panther, Marvel finally put to rest the notion that only white males can star as leads in their movies. I'm neither black nor American but the cultural significance of this film is not lost on me.
Still, as a fan of these films, my first question is whether or not the film is any good, and I'm quite happy to say that it is.
From the basics like the writing, acting and directing the film hits all the notes. I find it extraordinary that Ryan Coogler and his co-writer Joe Robert Cole have crafted a script that pays faithful homage to the comics from which the film is derived, yet at the same time builds an entire world here that doesn't require an encyclopedic knowledge of either Marvel's printed or filmed universe to make sense. It's particularly remarkable that, as the Marvel Cinematic Universe nears its tenth year anniversary, they are able to come up with a movie that can stand alone as well as this does, even though its connection to the bigger universe has already been established. Doctor Strange was the last such Marvel movie, but in that instance Stephen Strange had only just "entered the universe," whereas T'Challa has already been introduced to audiences and his fellow heroes. Recent Marvel hits like Spider-Man: Homecoming and Thor: Ragnarok cashed in on having other MCU characters appear in them, but this film stands proudly, almost defiantly on its own. In a way it mirrors the dilemma T'Challa, as the head of state of a very powerful nation, faces in the film: should Wakanda keep to itself, safe from those who would exploit its wealth, should it open up to the world and provide aid to those who need it, or should it use its wealth to arm those who have been oppressed for thousands of years? This movie is easily the most thematically ambitious of any Marvel production.
Even though there has yet to be a badly-acted Marvel film, it's worth noting that the cast of African-American, African-British and African actors led by Boseman, Nyong'o, and Gurira and a couple of "token" white British actors in Serkis (who first appeared in Avengers: Age of Ultron) and Martin Freeman (who reprises his "Civil War" role as Everett K. Ross), totally deliver the goods here. In particular, I was really happy to see Gurira, whom I had, prior to this film, exclusively seen as The Walking Dead's dreadlocked, katana-wielding bad-ass Michonne take to this new role like a fish to water. Sure, Boseman was excellent as T'Challa, but Gurira, Nyong'o, and the scene-stealing, wise-cracking Wright as Shuri demonstrate that you don't need to be an Amazon goddess to be a formidable woman in what has, up until this point, been almost exclusively a man's universe, i.e. the world of the superhero movie. I was not quite as sold on Michael B. Jordan's Erik Killmonger, even though there was clearly a lot of narrative investment in him, but to be fair he is a significant step up from the generic Marvel villain. Still, I'm sure Jordan is glad to have at least added one excellent Marvel movie to his resume to cancel out the utterly rancid Fantastic Four reboot he did three years ago. In contrast, I found Sterling K. Brown's turn as the tragic Prince N'Jobu to be both forceful and heartbreaking despite the very limited screen time the character had. It's so very calibrated, unlike Jordan's mostly unchecked rage; I haven't read a lot of reviews talking about it, but I feel it deserves a fair bit of recognition.
I do feel, however, that the cast feels a bit to bloated at times, with characters like Winston Duke's M'Baku serving more as a convenient plot device and even comic relief than a fully-fleshed out character. While veteran actors Forest Whitaker and Angela Bassett do a creditable job filling out their roles as Zuri, the royal adviser and Ramonda, the queen and T'Challa's mother, again, for constraints of running time they feel more like archetypes than characters in their own right, though Whitaker has a powerful scene with Boseman deep into the film. W'Kabi, the character of Kaluuya, now a superstar in his own right thanks to his Oscar-nominated turn in Get Out, feels distinctly underdeveloped and I sometimes wonder if he has scenes that ended up on the cutting room floor. Still, I suppose with a cast this big, it was inevitable that people would get lost in the proverbial shuffle. It's impressive that the 31-year-old Coogler juggled as many performances as he did.
Apart from those aspects, the production is a showcase of everything that's made Marvel movies such enjoyable cinematic outings over the last decade, from the meticulously-realized sets to the eye-popping visual effects, and then some. It's worth noting that there have been some departures from Marvel's "house style." Cinematographer Rachel Morrison's palette of colors is bolder and warmer than the often washed-out colors favored by Marvel's frequent go-to-directors of photography Ben Davis and Trent Opaloch, and Ruth E. Carter's fantastically-realized costumes, while not necessarily "better" than frequent MCU costume designer Alex Byrne's lively superhero wardrobe, are definitely unlike anything we've ever seen before in one of these movies. Composer Ludwig Goransson provides a score that fuses brassy superhero fanfare with traditional, percussion-based African rhythms and electronic urban hip-hop, and even though I'm still partial to Michael Giacchino's trippy Doctor Strange score as far as MCU music goes, this film is, again, wonderfully unique in its musical signature. There's also some very impressive bone-crunching hand-to-hand fighting here, something that Marvel films have been pretty good at depicting on screen since Captain America: Winter Soldier.
I hesitate to use the tag of "best Marvel movie ever" that a bit too many critics have been heaping on this film, as I feel that this distinction still belongs in equal measure to the first Iron Man film and the first Avengers film, without either of which, this film would not have been possible. I will readily agree, however, that this film is an extraordinary piece of work and that it is, by far, the 10-year-old studio's most important one to date, and quite possibly the most likely to alter the cinematic landscape as we know it.
9/10
written by Ryan Coogler and Joe Robert Cole
It's hard to review Marvel Studios' latest cinematic offering The Black Panther without bearing in mind the storm of publicity it's generated for the last few weeks, but I am going to give it the old college try.
Following the violent death of his father King T'Chaka (John Kani) in Captain America: Civil War, Prince T'Challa (Chadwick Boseman), must now assume the throne of the sovereign African nation of Wakanda, the most technologically-advanced society in the world. T'Challa assumes a great burden considering that, as advanced as Wakanda may be, it has kept its secrets hidden from the world for thousands of years, masquerading as yet another impoverished African nation while keeping its scientific advancements and its deposit of the highly valuable and unique metal, Vibranium to itself. With the throne, therefore, T'Challa must therefore safeguard Wakanda and its technology, the development of which is overseen by his younger sister, the prodigy Shuri (Letitia Wright). He will rely on the counsel of the elders, of Okoye (Danai Gurira), the general of his military, the Dora Milaje, and his old friend W'Kabi (Daniel Kaluuya). In contrast, though, one of Wakanda's spies and T'Challa's ex-lover Nakai (Lupita Nyong'o) disagrees with Wakanda's millennia-old policy of keeping to itself, having seen the misery in the rest of the world, and feels there is much they can do to help.
Only one man from the outside, Ulysses Klaue (Andy Serkis) has been able to steal Vibranium from Wakanda, which he was only able to do with inside help from no less than T'Chaka's brother N'Jobu (Sterling K. Brown) several years ago. With the death of T'Chaka, Klaue surfaces again for the first time in thirty years, this time allied with the mysterious Erik (Michael B. Jordan) who has terrifying plans for Wakanda and its technology. T'Challa brings Okoye and Nakai along to stop Klaue from selling (newly) stolen Vibranium in South Korea, but things go awry, and when long-held secrets are revealed, even the mighty Black Panther may not be prepared for what's coming.
After they basically revolutionized cinematic storytelling by pioneering the concept of the cinematic universe, Disney's Marvel Studios has been repeatedly criticized for playing it "safe," by adhering to specific narrative tropes, and while I respectfully disagree with it overall, this criticism isn't entirely without basis. One particular trope I agree with was that the persons of color in their movies, whether it was Don Cheadle's James Rhodes in Iron Man, Idris Elba's Heimdall in Thor, Anthony Mackie's Falcon in Captain America, Chiwetel Ejiofor's Mordo in Doctor Strange or Jacob Batalon's Ned in Spider-Man, were invariably portrayed as sidekicks to the white protagonist. It was getting downright embarrassing, especially after rival Warner Brothers/DC came out with the risible Suicide Squad, a film that featured African-American superstar Will Smith in the lead role, albeit as a bad guy turned good. With Black Panther, Marvel finally put to rest the notion that only white males can star as leads in their movies. I'm neither black nor American but the cultural significance of this film is not lost on me.
Still, as a fan of these films, my first question is whether or not the film is any good, and I'm quite happy to say that it is.
From the basics like the writing, acting and directing the film hits all the notes. I find it extraordinary that Ryan Coogler and his co-writer Joe Robert Cole have crafted a script that pays faithful homage to the comics from which the film is derived, yet at the same time builds an entire world here that doesn't require an encyclopedic knowledge of either Marvel's printed or filmed universe to make sense. It's particularly remarkable that, as the Marvel Cinematic Universe nears its tenth year anniversary, they are able to come up with a movie that can stand alone as well as this does, even though its connection to the bigger universe has already been established. Doctor Strange was the last such Marvel movie, but in that instance Stephen Strange had only just "entered the universe," whereas T'Challa has already been introduced to audiences and his fellow heroes. Recent Marvel hits like Spider-Man: Homecoming and Thor: Ragnarok cashed in on having other MCU characters appear in them, but this film stands proudly, almost defiantly on its own. In a way it mirrors the dilemma T'Challa, as the head of state of a very powerful nation, faces in the film: should Wakanda keep to itself, safe from those who would exploit its wealth, should it open up to the world and provide aid to those who need it, or should it use its wealth to arm those who have been oppressed for thousands of years? This movie is easily the most thematically ambitious of any Marvel production.
Even though there has yet to be a badly-acted Marvel film, it's worth noting that the cast of African-American, African-British and African actors led by Boseman, Nyong'o, and Gurira and a couple of "token" white British actors in Serkis (who first appeared in Avengers: Age of Ultron) and Martin Freeman (who reprises his "Civil War" role as Everett K. Ross), totally deliver the goods here. In particular, I was really happy to see Gurira, whom I had, prior to this film, exclusively seen as The Walking Dead's dreadlocked, katana-wielding bad-ass Michonne take to this new role like a fish to water. Sure, Boseman was excellent as T'Challa, but Gurira, Nyong'o, and the scene-stealing, wise-cracking Wright as Shuri demonstrate that you don't need to be an Amazon goddess to be a formidable woman in what has, up until this point, been almost exclusively a man's universe, i.e. the world of the superhero movie. I was not quite as sold on Michael B. Jordan's Erik Killmonger, even though there was clearly a lot of narrative investment in him, but to be fair he is a significant step up from the generic Marvel villain. Still, I'm sure Jordan is glad to have at least added one excellent Marvel movie to his resume to cancel out the utterly rancid Fantastic Four reboot he did three years ago. In contrast, I found Sterling K. Brown's turn as the tragic Prince N'Jobu to be both forceful and heartbreaking despite the very limited screen time the character had. It's so very calibrated, unlike Jordan's mostly unchecked rage; I haven't read a lot of reviews talking about it, but I feel it deserves a fair bit of recognition.
I do feel, however, that the cast feels a bit to bloated at times, with characters like Winston Duke's M'Baku serving more as a convenient plot device and even comic relief than a fully-fleshed out character. While veteran actors Forest Whitaker and Angela Bassett do a creditable job filling out their roles as Zuri, the royal adviser and Ramonda, the queen and T'Challa's mother, again, for constraints of running time they feel more like archetypes than characters in their own right, though Whitaker has a powerful scene with Boseman deep into the film. W'Kabi, the character of Kaluuya, now a superstar in his own right thanks to his Oscar-nominated turn in Get Out, feels distinctly underdeveloped and I sometimes wonder if he has scenes that ended up on the cutting room floor. Still, I suppose with a cast this big, it was inevitable that people would get lost in the proverbial shuffle. It's impressive that the 31-year-old Coogler juggled as many performances as he did.
Apart from those aspects, the production is a showcase of everything that's made Marvel movies such enjoyable cinematic outings over the last decade, from the meticulously-realized sets to the eye-popping visual effects, and then some. It's worth noting that there have been some departures from Marvel's "house style." Cinematographer Rachel Morrison's palette of colors is bolder and warmer than the often washed-out colors favored by Marvel's frequent go-to-directors of photography Ben Davis and Trent Opaloch, and Ruth E. Carter's fantastically-realized costumes, while not necessarily "better" than frequent MCU costume designer Alex Byrne's lively superhero wardrobe, are definitely unlike anything we've ever seen before in one of these movies. Composer Ludwig Goransson provides a score that fuses brassy superhero fanfare with traditional, percussion-based African rhythms and electronic urban hip-hop, and even though I'm still partial to Michael Giacchino's trippy Doctor Strange score as far as MCU music goes, this film is, again, wonderfully unique in its musical signature. There's also some very impressive bone-crunching hand-to-hand fighting here, something that Marvel films have been pretty good at depicting on screen since Captain America: Winter Soldier.
I hesitate to use the tag of "best Marvel movie ever" that a bit too many critics have been heaping on this film, as I feel that this distinction still belongs in equal measure to the first Iron Man film and the first Avengers film, without either of which, this film would not have been possible. I will readily agree, however, that this film is an extraordinary piece of work and that it is, by far, the 10-year-old studio's most important one to date, and quite possibly the most likely to alter the cinematic landscape as we know it.
9/10
Sunday, February 4, 2018
Shock and Awe: A Review of The Greatest Showman
directed by Michael Gracey
written by Jenny Bicks and Bill Condon
The life of P.T. Barnum, of which I admittedly know little, has been the subject of many works of fiction, both on screen and on stage. The latest iteration, a bombastic musical starring Hugh Jackman, paints his life in very broad strokes and offered (to me at least) a pleasant enough distraction from the stresses of life on a Saturday night.
The story begins with a young Phineas Barnum (Ellis Rubin), the son of a humble tailor to a rich family, dreaming of a life of greatness. He takes a liking to Charity Hallett (Skylar Dunn) the daughter of the family for whom his father works, only to be sharply reminded of their vastly different stations in life. Just as Charity is sent off to boarding school, tragedy strikes, and Barnum, even as he diligently writes letters to the love of his life, scrapes by on a daily basis just to survive. For all of the challenges facing him, the adult Barnum (Jackman) wins the affections of the grown-up Charity (Michelle Williams), who marries him despite the clear disapproval of her parents (Fredric Lehne and Kathryn Meisle), and even bears him two lovely daughters Caroline (Austyn Johnson) and Helen (Cameron Seely). After Barnum is laid off from his clerical job following a tragedy in the company, he decides to gamble and takes out a huge loan which he uses to purchase an old museum. Unable to sell tickets to his wax attractions at first, Barnum then seizes on the inspiration of having living attractions instead of inert ones, and proceeds to hire "freaks" or people with unusual features or abilities from all walks of life, including, among others, the bearded washerwoman Lettie Lutz (Keala Settle), the dwarf Charles Stratton (Sam Humphrey), the trapeze siblings W.D. Wheeler (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II) and his sister Anne (Zendaya). His show sells like hotcakes, but members of "high society" including Charity's parents, continue to look down their noses at him and his troupe of oddities. Barnum, despite being an unqualified success, remains determined to win their approval, and he's willing to go to great lengths to get it, including recruiting high-society playwright Philip Carlyle (Zac Efron) and taking famed European opera star Jenny Lind (Rebecca Ferguson) on tour across America, even though neither he, nor most other people in America, have ever heard her sing. To get what he seeks, Barnum is willing to risk everything, but will it all be worth it in the end?
Five years ago, Hugh Jackman lit up the screen as the cinematic iteration of one of theater's most beloved tragic heroes, Jean Valjean, in the adaptation of Les Miserables. As challenging as essaying that role may have been, he arguably had years of goodwill that the original musical had generated to help lift him up. Here, he was tasked with selling an all-new musical, with all new songs, to a generation of viewers preoccupied with other things, and I'll be darned if he hasn't done just that. He is mesmerizing as Barnum, and the film is aptly named if only based on his performance alone. He gets ample support from his cast, with Zac Efron performing a couple of numbers in a noticeably deeper voice than the one that made him famous to tweeners over a decade ago with the High School Musical movies, and with relative newcomer Keala Settle, in a star-making turn, belting out the film's signature song "This is Me."
A movie is more than a bunch of musical numbers strung together, though, and as a narrative the film stumbles several times. It's actually quite canny of Gracey, a first-time feature director, to keep things moving briskly and to drown virtually every scene in song, but even this tactic can't quite conceal the fact that with the exception of Barnum the characters are paper-thin and that the plot itself, a heavily fictionalized account of how P.T. Barnum founded his legendary, albeit recently defunct circus, is a patchwork of some pretty well-worn story tropes. Gracey and the Jackman-led cast do their darnedest to obscure the by-the-numbers scripting with some generous helpings of spectacle, and to their credit, they quite frequently succeed, courtesy of a lot of those very catchy songs.
My beef with this movie, though, was that even in putting clear emphasis in style over substance, the filmmakers still managed to fumble. There are two notable examples of this: in the opening number "A Million Dreams" which starts with the young Barnum singing to young Charity and then transitioning into the adult Barnum and Charity, the sound mixing felt glaringly off because, if I'm honest, it sounded conspicuously fake, and even had I not known that Ellis Rubin did not actually provide his character's singing voice, I would have suspected as much. The second was Rebecca Ferguson's sole song number as Jenny Lind, "Never Enough" which was irksome for the fact that Ferguson, who plays an opera singer in a freaking musical, doesn't actually sing her character's song herself. I found myself mystified by these creative decisions; in both the case of the young Barnum and Lind, these were pivotal and yet small roles, and it would surely have not have been that difficult to cast competent actors capable of acting during their smidgen of screen time and singing their single musical numbers.
With the Lind issue, in fact, I found it distinctly ironic that Barnum declares in the film that he wants to bring her to America because he wants to give people "something real" only for the filmmakers to give us a dubbed-over performance. It was almost as if his act of referring to himself as a huckster (though the real life Barnum was), was a sort of "meta" moment in the film.
Overall, though, I was still thoroughly entertained by this film, and if only for Hugh Jackman's fantastic charisma alone, as well as the show-stopping "This is Me" number. I think, though, that Jackman, and many of the talented cast members deserve a film that better showcases their talents as performers. Maybe in this day and age of the reinvigorated musical, courtesy of last year's La La Land and this very film, they will get exactly that.
7/10
written by Jenny Bicks and Bill Condon
The life of P.T. Barnum, of which I admittedly know little, has been the subject of many works of fiction, both on screen and on stage. The latest iteration, a bombastic musical starring Hugh Jackman, paints his life in very broad strokes and offered (to me at least) a pleasant enough distraction from the stresses of life on a Saturday night.
The story begins with a young Phineas Barnum (Ellis Rubin), the son of a humble tailor to a rich family, dreaming of a life of greatness. He takes a liking to Charity Hallett (Skylar Dunn) the daughter of the family for whom his father works, only to be sharply reminded of their vastly different stations in life. Just as Charity is sent off to boarding school, tragedy strikes, and Barnum, even as he diligently writes letters to the love of his life, scrapes by on a daily basis just to survive. For all of the challenges facing him, the adult Barnum (Jackman) wins the affections of the grown-up Charity (Michelle Williams), who marries him despite the clear disapproval of her parents (Fredric Lehne and Kathryn Meisle), and even bears him two lovely daughters Caroline (Austyn Johnson) and Helen (Cameron Seely). After Barnum is laid off from his clerical job following a tragedy in the company, he decides to gamble and takes out a huge loan which he uses to purchase an old museum. Unable to sell tickets to his wax attractions at first, Barnum then seizes on the inspiration of having living attractions instead of inert ones, and proceeds to hire "freaks" or people with unusual features or abilities from all walks of life, including, among others, the bearded washerwoman Lettie Lutz (Keala Settle), the dwarf Charles Stratton (Sam Humphrey), the trapeze siblings W.D. Wheeler (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II) and his sister Anne (Zendaya). His show sells like hotcakes, but members of "high society" including Charity's parents, continue to look down their noses at him and his troupe of oddities. Barnum, despite being an unqualified success, remains determined to win their approval, and he's willing to go to great lengths to get it, including recruiting high-society playwright Philip Carlyle (Zac Efron) and taking famed European opera star Jenny Lind (Rebecca Ferguson) on tour across America, even though neither he, nor most other people in America, have ever heard her sing. To get what he seeks, Barnum is willing to risk everything, but will it all be worth it in the end?
Five years ago, Hugh Jackman lit up the screen as the cinematic iteration of one of theater's most beloved tragic heroes, Jean Valjean, in the adaptation of Les Miserables. As challenging as essaying that role may have been, he arguably had years of goodwill that the original musical had generated to help lift him up. Here, he was tasked with selling an all-new musical, with all new songs, to a generation of viewers preoccupied with other things, and I'll be darned if he hasn't done just that. He is mesmerizing as Barnum, and the film is aptly named if only based on his performance alone. He gets ample support from his cast, with Zac Efron performing a couple of numbers in a noticeably deeper voice than the one that made him famous to tweeners over a decade ago with the High School Musical movies, and with relative newcomer Keala Settle, in a star-making turn, belting out the film's signature song "This is Me."
A movie is more than a bunch of musical numbers strung together, though, and as a narrative the film stumbles several times. It's actually quite canny of Gracey, a first-time feature director, to keep things moving briskly and to drown virtually every scene in song, but even this tactic can't quite conceal the fact that with the exception of Barnum the characters are paper-thin and that the plot itself, a heavily fictionalized account of how P.T. Barnum founded his legendary, albeit recently defunct circus, is a patchwork of some pretty well-worn story tropes. Gracey and the Jackman-led cast do their darnedest to obscure the by-the-numbers scripting with some generous helpings of spectacle, and to their credit, they quite frequently succeed, courtesy of a lot of those very catchy songs.
My beef with this movie, though, was that even in putting clear emphasis in style over substance, the filmmakers still managed to fumble. There are two notable examples of this: in the opening number "A Million Dreams" which starts with the young Barnum singing to young Charity and then transitioning into the adult Barnum and Charity, the sound mixing felt glaringly off because, if I'm honest, it sounded conspicuously fake, and even had I not known that Ellis Rubin did not actually provide his character's singing voice, I would have suspected as much. The second was Rebecca Ferguson's sole song number as Jenny Lind, "Never Enough" which was irksome for the fact that Ferguson, who plays an opera singer in a freaking musical, doesn't actually sing her character's song herself. I found myself mystified by these creative decisions; in both the case of the young Barnum and Lind, these were pivotal and yet small roles, and it would surely have not have been that difficult to cast competent actors capable of acting during their smidgen of screen time and singing their single musical numbers.
With the Lind issue, in fact, I found it distinctly ironic that Barnum declares in the film that he wants to bring her to America because he wants to give people "something real" only for the filmmakers to give us a dubbed-over performance. It was almost as if his act of referring to himself as a huckster (though the real life Barnum was), was a sort of "meta" moment in the film.
Overall, though, I was still thoroughly entertained by this film, and if only for Hugh Jackman's fantastic charisma alone, as well as the show-stopping "This is Me" number. I think, though, that Jackman, and many of the talented cast members deserve a film that better showcases their talents as performers. Maybe in this day and age of the reinvigorated musical, courtesy of last year's La La Land and this very film, they will get exactly that.
7/10
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