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
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