Hugh Jackman as The Greatest Showman
The Greatest Showman, the directorial debut of Australian Michael Gracey, is a borderline masterpiece.
The Greatest Showman, the directorial debut of Australian visual effects artist and TV commercial maker Michael Gracey, is a borderline masterpiece. It’s a musical with missteps, but it has frequent moments of splendour and its overall message speaks to our uneasy times.
Set mainly in New York, it’s a loose account of how PT Barnum rose from a poor childhood to be a rich and famous showman, co-founder of the 20th century circus that bore his name.
When I say loose, I mean semi-detached. This is a song-and-dance movie, not a biopic, and it leaves out a lot, including some of the Barnum “attractions’’ that were vile.
Barnum is Hugh Jackman, who we know can tread the boards and hit the notes. The Wolverine is also the Boy from Oz, after all. He floats this exuberant film, in yet another reminder that he is just about our most versatile movie-to-movie star. Jackman is ably supported by Zac Efron, in one of the few roles in which he doesn’t strip, and a superb group of actors who are the midgets, bearded women, fat men, tall men, trapeze artists, tattooed faces, albinos and so on that made Barnum’s name.
It’s the members of this motley crew who imbue the film with meaning. “Our mothers were ashamed of us,’’ says the bearded woman (a superb Keala Settle, nominated for a Golden Globe for her rendition of This is Me).
Barnum may have profited by exploiting unusual people, but in doing so he put them in the public eye. I doubt the “freaks”, as protesters called them, were as much of a “family” as is the case in this movie, but they were noticed.
And this relationship between the curator and his “curiosities” is fascinating, not least because it allows Jackman room to be more than a handsome cabaret star. Is he a narcissist, a man who, as his wife Charity (a miscast Michelle Williams) says, has only ever loved himself? Is he a parvenu, a class chip on his shoulder, who will slam the door in the faces of his “exotic” performers the minute he moves into highbrow circles?
There’s a backstory to this movie. Gracey was making a TV commercial for the Japanese market when he met the celebrity who would imbibe the iced tea up for sale: Jackman. They hit it off and Gracey later sent Jackman the script for a musical he wanted to make.
That was eight years ago. Jackman has said it was not easy to persuade a Hollywood studio to finance a musical directed by an unknown Australian. There are reports that James Mangold was brought in post-production to help out. He is credited as an executive producer.
Jackman’s pull would have helped assemble the impressive crew. The scriptwriters are Jenny Bicks (Sex and the City) and Bill Condon, who won an Oscar for the remarkable 1998 film Gods and Monsters and also wrote the musical Chicago (2002). Irish cinematographer Seamus McGarvey has a top-notch track record, from Alan Rickman’s The Winter Guest (1997) to the Joe Wright duo Atonement (2007) and Anna Karenina (2012), both of which earned him Oscar nominations.
The honest, uplifting songs are written by Benj Pasek and Justin Paul, who won an Oscar for La La Land. The musical score is by John Debney, Oscar-nominated for Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ.
So there’s a lot of experience here, and it shows. The movie opens with Jackman alone on stage, either anticipating or remembering the life to come/the life past. It’s an arresting start. Other highlights include Barnum and his soon-to-be partner, upper-class playwright Phillip Carlyle (Efron), facing off over shots and songs in a bar; Carlyle meeting the trapezist (singer and actress Zendaya) for the first time; and she and Carlyle declaring their impossible love for each other, as ropes swing skyward and sandbags plummet to the ground.
While the performers are based (loosely) on real people, Carlyle is fictional. He’s a perfect addition, one that emphasises the importance — and the injustice — of class in 19th-century America.
As I’ve noted, a lot of capital-N names helped make this film. But the director, the bloke who wore a beanie to the red carpet premiere in Sydney, deserves our admiration. He is the showman who, like Barnum, has his name above the door. Whether or not this $US85 million movie makes money, Michael Gracey has — to quote from one of the opening songs — lived a million dreams. He is a filmmaker to watch.
The Greatest Showman (PG)
4 stars
National release