1.01.2018

Knee-jerk review: "The Greatest Showman"

1. This big, sweeping musical often plays like a spinoff of Baz Luhrmann's 2001 masterpiece Moulin Rogue in the way it blends lush period art design with a slick contemporary look and modern-sounding songs.
2. It also remakes the sleazy scoundrel PT Barnum into a heroic entrepreneur, which can get a little uncomfortable if you stop to think about it.
3. To the filmmakers' credit, they do give Barnum a pretty significant flaw: a selfish desire to gain the approval of old money society at any cost, even if it means straining his marriage, risking all of his money, or even turning his back on friends and colleagues.  So we suppose it's not a complete hagiography.
4. We do wonder why the movie got made.  Exactly whose passion project was this?  Who was determined to make a musical about Barnum? 
5. Rebecca Ferguson has our attention now.  Striking.
6. In addition to being a musical, the movie also gives a big role to Barnum's freak show "oddities." The bearded lady has a solo, people.
7. So, all in all, it's a pretty weird movie.  Not to say we didn't find it entertaining and rousing. It's just... odd.  Note also that the TV spots make no mention of the songs or the oddities.  It's like they knew better than to show the "real" movie.
8. There's no denying the considerable charisma of star Hugh Jackman.
9. But the movie's two best scenes feature song-and-dance bits with Zac Efron (a fun two-handed number with Jackman and Efron at a bar, then a grandly choreographed acrobat sequence with Efron's love interest Zendaya).
10. Poor Michele Williams is underused, here asked to do little more than glow winsomely.
11. Engaging despite the overall strangeness of the story.

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