The Critics are Right! Quelle Dreck!

Rating: 2/10 (22 January 2018)

I see about a hundred movies a year, and this is the first one I have walked out on in recent memory. Rather than "magical" I found the songs to be mediocre and so repetitive that I wanted to tear my hair out. Singing "A million dreams is all it's gonna take" over and over and over again is no substitute for a plot. I left the second time I saw the same collection of "human oddities" performing what seemed to be the exact same out-of-place modern song and dance routine for the second time in a circus ring, to the delight of an audience dressed in period costume, but rocking out like no 19th century audience ever had.
It's not that I'm not totally averse to modern song and dance in a story that takes place in the 19th century. I enjoyed Moulin Rouge, a movie whose anachronistic music seemed jarring in 2001. But although that movie wasn't exactly "Citizen Kane", at least it had Nicole Kidman to look at.
It may be that I know a bit too much about American history to let all the absurd inaccuracies past. Maybe the audience that loved this movie had no idea that Jenny Lind was an opera singer, not a contestant on "The Voice." Maybe they had no idea that she was a philanthropist who gave away the vast sums she earned to her favorite charities, not a hootchie momma homewrecker. Maybe they have no idea that Barnum lured his "human oddities" to his shows with the promise of steady pay and not human dignity. Or maybe they just have never seen any of the classic movie musicals with songs with witty, memorable lyrics.