Showmanship

Last year's movie The Greatest Showman was a longtime passion project for star Hugh Jackman. He had to wield every bit of his considerable clout to convince a studio to make an original musical for the screen. Recently, I got to see it for myself, and decide if the effort was all worth it.

My own interest in the film had nothing to do with Jackman (or Zac Efron, or Michelle Williams, or Zendaya, or any of the other stars), nor with the life of the protagonist P. T. Barnum. My interest was in the composers of the original songs, Benj Pasek and Justin Paul. This is the duo that won an Oscar for their work on La La Land and a Tony for their work on the phenomenal Dear Evan Hansen. I was eager to see what they created here.

The answer? More fantastic material. The songs are by far the highlight of the film. There's a great mix of styles and tempos and rhythms, and hardly a weak number in the bunch. There's fun toe-tappers, loud anthems, plant-your-feet-and-deliver show stoppers, and more. Several of the songs have stuck with me for days; I catch myself humming little phrases, and I'm sure I'll be picking up the soundtrack album in short order.

The performance and staging of the music is worthy of the composition. The movie does an excellent job of straddling two worlds: it's both very steeped in the conventions of a stage musical, and full of visuals that could never be realized on a stage. It's big and brash in the way classic Hollywood musicals were brash, while feeling even more ambitious and technically impressive. And all the performers step up to give it everything. You would expect Jackman and Efron, both with well known musical backgrounds, to deliver, and certainly they do. But there's also a reason why "This Is Me" was the Oscar-nominated song of this batch, and it's in no small way thanks to the performance by Keala Settle.

All that said, for all its musical strengths, the film is weak on narrative. The story is trite and simple, and has been told a hundred times before in almost exactly the same beats. (Plus, a fair amount of criticism I skimmed later suggests that it's not even a particularly accurate telling of P. T. Barnum's life, which makes me question more why it had to be this way.) In short, if it weren't for those amazing songs, with all their visual and aural delights, the movie would be utterly forgettable.

Of course, if you must pick just one element of a musical to be superlative, you pick the music, right? So, overall, I'd give the thumbs up to The Greatest Showman. A fairly enthusiastic one, even. But I do feel like it had so much going for it that it's a shame it didn't reach its full potential. I'd grade the movie a B+.