A Truly Horrible Night at the Movies

Rating: 3/10 (28 December 2017)

I decided for a lark to pick a movie at random with my buddy Chijindu and we decided to go see "The Greatest Showman." What a mistake!
"The Greatest Showman" was obviously intended as wholesome entertainment, but that only makes it a well-intended mess. The main problem with the film is that hardly any imagination went into creating a good story. The film largely replaces plot, dialogue, and character development with wall-to-wall special effects and loud and yet forgettable songs. Moreover, I can understand why the studio heads decided to jam in as many special effects and jarring songs into this picture as possible: the screenplay was rubbish and borrowed shamelessly from the plot formulas of a dozen other films. The scene where P.T. Barnum as a boy meets Charity comes straight out of Charles Dickens' Great Expectations, which covers the subject of young love far more competently. Then midway through the movie, me and Chijindu called out the three plot formulas that determined the course of the rest of the film:
(1) The cliche of whether P.T. Barnum was going to embrace the snobbish aristocrats or stay true to the circus performers who made him famous.
(2) The conflict between an interracial romance and society's prejudices.
(3) The love triangle involving P.T. Barnum, an opera singer, and his wife.
As a result, this movie amounted to three half-baked plot formulas that were covered more capably in other movies. The screenplay also represents missed opportunities to explore some truly interesting areas. For instance, I would like to learn something about how P.T. Barnum and Phillip Carlyle ran their circus and managed costs. And maybe P.T. Barnum's circus could have gone on a number of extraordinary adventures all over the United States. But alas no, this film did not want to take advantage of any of these opportunities even though its ambitious budget certainly could have afforded it. The other problem with this movie is that while bigotry is one of its central themes, it is not handled in an intelligent and honest way. One of the film's unexplained conceits is that P.T. Barnum and Phillip Carlyle are virtually immune from any of the prejudices of their time and can see their world through 21st century eyes. By depicting Barnum and Carlyle in this post-modern light, the studio heads avoid the difficulties of explaining how these two characters dealt with the internal conflict between their prejudices and being exposed to the humanity of the circus performers.
To be sure, these reservations about the plot might not have weighed as heavily as they did if the wall-to-wall songs were any good. Unfortunately, the songs in "The Greatest Showman" do not belong to the tradition of great musicals. In Disney's "Little Mermaid," there was close collaboration between the people who wrote the lyrics and the people who set those lyrics to music. As a result, we still fondly remember Little Mermaid's songs like "Under the Sea." But no such collaboration took place here. Instead, what appears to have happened was that truly horrible lyrics were written and the composer had the thankless job of trying and failing miserably to set these lyrics to music. These songs are memorable only for how loud and embarrassing they are and I challenge anyone to be able to remember the tune to any of these songs -- and I bet they could not do it.
As a result, "The Greatest Showman" is a film with good character actors trapped in formulaic plot with terrible musical numbers. There are some brief moments of wonder, including some rare quiet moments where P.T. Barnum and Charity are talking with their daughters Helen and Caroline. But unfortunately those moments are completely overwhelmed by the awful musical numbers (which were clearly prerecorded and then lip synched on screen) and the absence of a great storyline. "The Great Showman," in a phrase, is anything but a great show.