‘The Greatest Showman’ or — Kill Me Now?
I don’t know what possessed me to watch ‘The Greatest Showman’ (2017) last night but it must have been demonic possession. Nothing serious, just the 24 hour kind. I was also curious how a movie that was savaged by the critics was such a massive success with audiences. Maybe I’d respond to this movie on a deep-seated emotional level and feel at one with the mass of humanity, my follow brothers and sisters craving only to be entertained?
Well, I’ll tell you this — if this is what the mass of humanity considers “entertainment” then tar and feather me as a card-carrying elitist snob of epic proportions right now because this movie is fucking awful and my fellow brothers and sister are all idiots!
‘The Greatest Showman’ tells the story of serial animal abuser, freak exploiter and rampant narcissist P.T. Barnum as he attempts to inflict upon the world the one form of entertainment nobody asked for and pulls every together in their hatred of — the bloody circus! However, this is a sanitised, “feel-good” movie therefore ALL drama and tension, ALL controversy, ALL even vaguely negative viewing of events and people must be destroyed and extinguished from the record. Only pure “entertainment” can be allowed. This means the film is a lie.
This lie is also a musical. Now as everybody knows musicals need to be long in order to fit in all the story, drama, characters, plot and musical numbers etc. It’s why most musicals tend to be two and a half to three hours long. ‘The Greatest Showman’ deals with keeping to a brief running time by taking a truly radical artistic step, and that’s to jettison EVERYTHING! Simply throw it all out! So all story, all plot, all drama and certainly all tension are gone and, instead, simply condensed into a series of bullet points. With that done then — HEY PRESTO! — it’s only 90 minutes long. That’s one way to achieve brevity, I guess; simply don’t bother with any form of depth or nuance in the slightest.
A good example is the opening song… at least, I think it’s the opening song because all the songs sound exactly the same meaning they all merge into one indistinguishable mush (this film doesn’t have a carefully composed soundtrack so much as suffers from musical tinnitus). This opening number starts with P.T. Barnum as a young boy scampering about and falling in love and then, just as the song closes… BAM! he’s suddenly fifty years old?! Where did all that intervening time go?
And ‘The Greatest Showman’ does this constantly, gaily leaping from one event to the next with total abandon. I know musical numbers are meant to push and drive the narrative forward but here it’s so extreme it feels more like the musical numbers have simply grabbed the story by the scruff of the neck and kicked it down a flight of stairs. It’s an awfully violent way for a musical to treat its own story via song. This is why the story feels so mangled and bruised; it’s because it’s been treated like Father Karras at the end of ‘The Exorcist’ (1973)!
This means that there is LITERALLY no drama or tension throughout the movie at all. Nothing pays off because nothing has been allowed to build up into any discernable form. Add onto that the sanitised views of Barnum (there’s zero mention in the film of the time he accidentally boiled and poached alive two beluga whales which was, for me, the only scene I actually wanted to see in the film) and, again, there is nothing of consequence at all.
The same can be said of the music which straddles that line between ‘bloody awful’ and ‘fucking bollocks’ with surprisingly deft skill. Melodically the tunes are as flat as the story, just sort of flat-lining along in that sort of autotune, ‘X Factor’, anodyne, insipid, homogenous shit that feels like a willful rejection of EVERYTHING Stephen Sondheim was sent to this planet to tell us to reveal to us about musical theatre.
The film is also distastefully coy — an affair is only hinted at — which makes it immediately untrustworthy, and while it strives for a stance of total inclusion the message is still if you want to be accepted it’s better to be rich, good looking and white. Besides, I saw no inclusion here and only a deceitful celebration of exploitation.
‘The Greatest Showman’ has been deliberately stripped of anything offensive, any hint of drama (a MASSIVE mistake for any movie), any frisson of conflict. Instead, everyone has to be “good”, seen in the best possible light; every second has to be upbeat yet because nothing of substance is powering any of this it means the movie is not delivering an engrossing story but, instead, is purely engaged in a form of attention seeking. This film should be pitied.
I can imagine some people telling me I shouldn’t be so cynical and snobby because it is simply a “feel good” movie. Well, I sat through the entire thing and by the end I felt fucking awful. Now explain THAT to me!
