IMDb plot summary: Celebrates the birth of show business and tells of a visionary who rose from nothing to create a spectacle that became a worldwide sensation.
Directed by Michael Gracey. Stars Hugh Jackman, Michelle Williams, and Zac Efron.
The Greatest Showman is a musical retelling of the life of P.T. Barnum, most famous for his circus. Hugh Jackman plays Barnum, and we follow him from his earliest conceptions of the idea through his ups and downs as he carries it out. I was not looking forward to watching this movie because it did not feel like something that I would enjoy, and I was extremely correct. The music is done by current musical darlings Pasek and Paul whom I have almost never enjoyed (with the exception of their work in the film Spirited). So none of the music does it for me. But on top of that, the script is extremely strange. Barnum is curiously unexplored as a character. It is never clear what it is he actually wants or likes about the circus business. The clearest objective we get for him is simply "making money and being respected," but if that was his whole goal, show business is obviously the worst place to make that happen. The film is full of vague metaphor about working in the circus being a form of "breaking free" and "opening the cages," but we never once see any kind of actual reasoning or passionate love for the circus, or any of the people in it, until the very very end of the movie, when it pretends it's been there all along. This film could either have approached this from the point of view of Barnum loving people and therefore wanting to highlight them or Barnum loving show business and therefore getting a high from the performance aspect, but it does neither, and as such it rings incredibly hollow and unintentionally paints Barnum as the real-life monster he was while shoving him through story beats written for a much more likable character. I do wish I had been wrong about this one, but it is absolutely not for me.
How it entered my Flickchart:
The Greatest Showman (2017)
lost to The Sparks Brothers (held at #1996)
lost to The Doorway to Hell (held at #2992)
lost to Stepsister from Planet Weird (#3492 → #3484)
beat The Collective (#3743 → #3744)
lost to No Reservations (#3617 → #3616)
lost to The Music Man (#3680 → #3665)
lost to To Kill a King (held at #3711)
lost to The Lodger (#3727 → #3714)
beat Kingpin (#3735 → #3737)
beat Super Troopers (#3731 → #3732)
beat Live a Little, Love a Little (#3729 → #3730)
lost to VeggieTales: Sheerluck Holmes and the Golden Ruler (held at #3728)
📊 Ranked #3727/3998 on my Flickchart
🎯 Flickscore™: 7.