The Greatest Showman Review: A Faux-Inspiring Musical That Earns an Uneasy Smile

If you start your big musical movie with a song called “The Greatest Show,” you’re setting up some pretty big expectations. One could almost call it hubris, though that word suggests a kind of aggro arrogance. The Greatest Showman—the new movie musical which houses “The Greatest Show”—is slightly more humble than that. The film may be a vessel for some noxious, platitudinous cynicism, but there’s nevertheless something still quaint about it. It mostly just wants you to have a nice time, it insists; to feel cheered and uplifted as a big, lumbering elephant carries us off a cliff.

Which isn’t to say the movie is good. It isn’t, really. The Greatest Showman—about P.T. Barnum putting together the first modern circus—is a labor of love for its star, huggable old Hugh Jackman, who has been trying to get this film made for the better part of a decade. So I feel a little bad using my sharpest words to cut it down, but such are the pains of my profession. Still, it’s by no means a total wash.

What work best are the musical numbers, bombastic and intricately staged by first-time director Michael Gracey. I’d listened to the soundtrack before seeing the film, because I’ve been a bit obsessed with the movie since the phrase “Hugh Jackman circus musical” first lodged itself in my consciousness some months ago and I was eager to get my hands on whatever material I could as soon as possible. On mere listen, the songs are tinny, the lyrics jumbles of senseless clichés, the melodies ground out of some viral pop-music machine. I’d kind of expected this: the songs were written by Benj Pasek and Justin Paul, who won Oscars this year for writing the lyrics to “City of Stars” from La La Land, but are better known to me as the Tony-winning composers of Dear Evan Hansen—a smash-hit Broadway musical that trades in canned inspiration masking a creeping, shallow cynicism.

But in execution, on screen, Pasek and Paul’s rubbery songs—entirely anachronistic to the film’s era—somehow gracefully come to life, particularly a barn-burner diva ballad called “Never Enough” and a duet between Zac Efron and Zendaya called “Rewrite the Stars.” In “Never Enough,” we see Rebecca Ferguson as world-renowned singer Jenny Lind, belting out an aria as if her life depended on it. But who we hear is The Voice contestant Loren Allred, who replaced Ferguson’s vocals in postproduction. It’s a bit jarring. That sense of displacement aside, though, “Never Enough” (and its teary reprise) is a true knockout, a moment of soaring theatricality focused on a lone person standing in place. “Rewrite the Stars” takes the opposite tack, sending Zendaya and Efron swinging and spinning on acrobat ropes, their daring and agility serving as perfectly easy metaphor for the risk and exhilaration of young love.

There are some big group numbers that rumble the seats, the centerpiece being “This Is Me,” a song Fox has been touting for months now—teaching the people of Indonesia the choreography and assembling a group of influencers to serenade Singapore. It plays well in the movie; it‘s rousing and triumphant and brought a tear to my eye. But it’s also probably the best example of this movie’s more sinister, calculating aspects. It’s a song sung by the cast of “oddities” Barnum has assembled for his show, led by the Bearded Lady (Keala Settle, wailing away well), announcing their pride and autonomy and worth in the face of the rich swells and bigoted mobs who discount and discredit them. The movie is trying, in that way, to be a champion of the downtrodden, an empowerment narrative to fit in nicely alongside heaps of YouTube feel-goodism and Instagram inspirational quotes and the more sugary wisps of whatever is left of Glee.

And yet . . . I couldn’t tell you a single one of these people’s names. None of them have any kind of character arc to speak of. They are forever in the periphery, unless you count Zendaya—which brings up a lot of questions about how the film contextualizes race, which is only expressly confronted in one brief scene. The movie is instead almost entirely about Barnum trying to make a name for himself, sometimes to the detriment of his slavishly supportive wife (Michelle Williams, having a weird December). Which is a fine thing to make a movie about! But to position Barnum as some sort of egalitarian hero, and to trot out the hollow, mawkish “This Is Me” anthem over and over again in the marketing campaign when none of the characters supposedly being ennobled in the song have any real story or texture in the actual film, is a really crass appropriation of the current political moment.

In a weaselly little move, the film, written by Jenny Bicks and Bill Condon, also attempts to inoculate itself against any criticism by putting a critic (Paul Sparks) right into the story, framing him as a scold and a jerk who fails to see the majesty of what Barnum and his ragtag circus folk are doing. And the film ends with a quote from Barnum himself, expressing that the best kind of art, the purest kind, is the art that makes people happy. Which is maudlin and self-preserving, and not at all representative of Barnum’s less altruistic view of the masses. It’s also a darkly placating kind of imperative, chiding us from interrogating the film—or anything else—on terms beyond whether or not it made us smile. Because that is, after all, all that matters.

The fact is, The Greatest Showman did make me smile, despite its clunky storytelling and troubled optics. The songs have been in my head for weeks, and not unpleasantly so. I’m prone to support musicals, a great American art form that forever struggles to be taken seriously. In that spirit, I’m reluctantly rooting for The Greatest Showman, for Hugh, for Zac, for poor Rebecca Ferguson’s lost voice. But all my general affection for a musical trying to make it in the world can’t quite cover up the stink of what I think is lying at the heart of this film. It’s all a bit meta, a faux-inspirational movie about a trickster showman accidentally serving as commentary on the faux-inspiration industry.

Or maybe it’s not an accident at all. Maybe the movie is a Prince of Humbug itself, showing us something shiny while figuring us all suckers. It’s wrong in that calculation, I think. I believe most of us are savvier than that. But who knows. As a dubiously great man once said, every crowd has a silver lining.

Get Vanity Fair’s HWD NewsletterSign up for essential industry and award news from Hollywood.Richard LawsonRichard Lawson is a columnist for Vanity Fair's Hollywood, reviewing film and television and covering entertainment news and gossip. He lives in New York City.

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