The Greatest Showman (dir. Michael Gracey)

The best way to describe first-time director Michael Gracey’s saccharine musical biopic “The Greatest Showman” is by defining it in its own genre: musical montage. It’s a special classification which must be adhered to with the following contrived traits; telling a story through the medium of montage, interspersed with forgettably derivative musical numbers. Here, a perfectly straightforward narrative is complicated by the director in favor of garish aesthetics, lavish and over the top sequences, all at the expense of the most important trait - storytelling.

For a film which boasts itself as the true story of an American pioneer P.T Barnum (Hugh Jackman), Gracey’s muddled tale is half-way between mediocre bio-pic and sloppy musical.

We begin with Barnum’s impromptu firing from the shipping company he punches numbers at. He is clearly unhappy with his mediocre work and tired of his mundane existence. Promising his family, led by wife Charity (Michelle Williams) and daughters Caroline (Austyn Johnson) and Helen (Cameron Seely), that his obsessions with the extravagant will bear true in no time, he secures a loan from the bank and begins work on his the most incredible show anyone has ever seen - a circus-like production which includes bearded ladies, small people and other unexpected forms of entertainment.

We must remember, it’s a musical at heart, though from the lyricists behind "La La Land", the music varies between the nostalgic offerings of Christina Aguilera to an instantly forgettable YouTube star cover. Gracey tells the story through his music, and uses montage to mop up the extraneous drama. It’s inept filmmaking of the highest order, and no wonder the studio rallied veteran director James Mangold to help salvage the films wayward narrative inconsistencies.

Sure, the set pieces are lavish and orchestrated with a certain amount of oomph, but it all seems so insignificant when put into context - here’s a film about a man who made his fortune using a variety of people marginalized by society, and the representation of the circus “talent” falls short of the dramatic weight necessary to hold your attention.

On an aesthetic level, though the action has a lot going for it, there’s something undeniably stage-like about the drama. It doesn’t belong anywhere near a cinema (the musical numbers are enough to prove this), and as the drama begins to gain momentum, i couldn’t help but feeling that i really was watching a movie, instead of actually being immersed in the drama - and that’s not how the audience should react to a film about a real-life icon. Additionally, on a narrative level, it’s all over the place - each sequence has a contradictory tone and appears to be from several different movies. Though the music numbers such as “This is Me” and “The Greatest Show” appear to be nodding toward something with more depth, they fail at reaching the resonance they must to make up for the soap opera drama.

Supporting performances from Zendaya and Zac Efron, as Annie the trapeze artist and depressed playwright Phillip Carlyle respectively, are terribly incidental though they get a large chunk of screen time. Their romance subplot is shamefully as wooden and un-engaging as the rest of the drama, and appears to exist merely to fill in the narrative between the set pieces. Efron looks desperate - hoping to glide along recently in his films with charm alone - once the up and coming song and dance man of Hollywood, with dynamic range and a movie star appearance, appears to be out of his depth here. An additional subplot with Rebecca Ferguson, who is the by far the best thing about the film, as world renowned opera singer Jenny Lind is an attractive aside to the mind-numbing mundanity of the rest of the drama, though does less to save the film than remind you of what could have been.

But it’s all down the director’s choices of presenting the core subject of the film. If you look at other musicals of recent times - like the aforementioned La La Land, or even something like Chicago, which blends true-life drama and catchy and well-known musical numbers - it’s depiction of P.T Barnum’s controversial life in show business is a combination of a soon-to-be cancelled soap opera directed for the Disney channel. By the time the final third started, It becomes evident that Gracey cares only for the surface and not the substance, which is why character development and coherent storytelling are notable only by their absence. Jackman must be duly credited with salvaging the films commercial appeal, as there’s no doubt that it will find an audience. But a biopic must be defined by it’s central character’s arc and your ability to find a way to understand their strengths and weaknesses - in this particular ham-fisted attempt, which took no more than six editors to complete, there’s much more questions than answers about our titular character’s life, and you wonder if you couldn’t find everything about the man on his wikipedia page.

Rating 0/5.