The Music is Wonderful

Rating: 8/10 (22 September 2018)

What a pleasant surprise. I wasn't expecting this movie to be very good. With a metascore in the mid-forties, the critical reviews are really pretty bad. But audience reaction is nearly 80% positive. In fact, The Greatest Showman is a lot of fun. If you like a good musical, then this movie should be in your watchlist.
The songs are written by the same Oscar winning team that wrote the music for La La Land and many of the crew members on that successful movie worked on this one. The songs are terrific and will keep your knee tapping all through the movie. This is Me, nominated for original Song Oscar, is sung, initially, by the fat lady (with a beard no less) and really brings together the ultimate message of the movie - that all people matter, regardless of what they look like. Another terrific song (Never Enough) is sung by the Voice's Loren Allred, dubbing for the actress Rebecca Ferguson. And finally, Zac Ephron and Zendaya have a beautiful duet involving a lot of aerial trapeze and rope tricks as they play a young couple in love. Hugh Jackman and Michelle Williams, as Mr. and Mrs. P. T. Barnum, have several songs of their own. The music is clearly not from the time of the movie (mid-1800s), but is still powerful and uplifting. The music is all just feel-good.
And It pretty much has to be, because the movie, as a movie, leaves a lot to be desired. This is the feature film directing debut of Michael Gracey who is mostly known for doing commercials. He's done a couple of other movies, but none of them are recognizable. Jenny Bicks is one of the writers, mostly known for her Sex and the City TV scripts. Bill Condon, who won an Oscar for his adapted screenplay Gods and Monsters, also worked on the script. But try as these three might, the story does not carry this movie. There are holes in the plot big enough to drive a circus elephant through and although Jackman and Williams do credible jobs, these are not their most outstanding performances. (Jackman was nearly perfect in Les Miserables and Williams had an outstanding performance in All the Money in the World, also in this year's Oscar movies.)
The film tries to make up for sloppy directing and an inadequate script with dazzling visual effects (there are 406 people credited for visual effects alone) employing CGI enhancements to many of the musical numbers. I'm sure that a good chunk of the $84 million budget went to the visual effects work. I do give the team credit for making it difficult to tell what is natural and what is computer generated. The movie also has a team of six editors, several of whom have won previous Oscars in editing, who had the unenviable job of trying to piece together a movie from all the musical scenes. And, for the most part, they do a good job. But an editor can only work with what has been filmed!
So, basically, the critics are right - this movie is sort of a mess, lacking a coherent vision and a carefully written script. And yet, the movie does manage to convey a positive and entertaining message. It does that from its musical performances which, by themselves, manage to captivate the audience and inspire us to feel good about being human (which is all-to-difficult to do these days.). Sit back, turn the volume up, and just absorb the songs - just don't spend a lot of time trying to put them together into a story.