This Is The Greatest Show

(Movie)

I just watched The Greatest Showman for the first time. Yes, that brand new 2017 movie. And perhaps I now know what evangelists mean when they say they’ve been “saved”.

Picture me, settled into a 4-hour plane ride when I opened this and was immediately smacked in the face by a soundtrack of banger after banger after banger from the Rachel-Platten-Fight-Song Cinematic Universe. Nearly-no-skips. A motion picture so carefully crafted for me that I missed it entirely for over six years.

how The Greatest Showman soundtrack feels

Below please find a very accurate and detailed plot summary of this movie; spoilers don’t matter because… 6.5 years old¹.

This film² opens with a vintage-stylized 20th Century Fox production slate, but then immediately cuts to the modern one. Must’ve needed to smash any assumption that this was a Disney movie. (Disney now owns this company so 🤠)

We meet young PT Barnum (PT stands for something nonsensical, let’s just call him Hugh Jackman Barnum), whose arc begins as “boy with ratty shoes”— a far cry from “man with snazzy top hat” where we’ll see him later. He’s immediately down bad for a young blonde girl named Charity³. But they can’t be together as minors because she is shipped off to boarding school. Basically he’s a poor boy whose story starts because his crush leaves and his father dies and a woman with a facial deformity offers him food when he is hungry. Yes this is the movie’s way of showing his thought process of “wow people who are ugly can be good”. Now if you think this is shallow and vain, this is the entire thesis of the movie. Hugh Jackman Barnum learns to love “freaks” (a word used over and over again, The Greatest Showman loves heralding the FREAKS)!!!!

Hugh Jackman Barnum reunites with his child bride (she’s grown now, into Miscast Michelle Williams) when he begs her rich father to let them get married. Daddy hates Hugh Jackman Barnum but Miscast Michelle Williams goes to the dirty city with her lover anyway. They have a musical number on the roof where the sheets do their own choreography and suddenly they have two daughters.

Sheet-ography.

Hugh Jackman Barnum (do you mind if I just say HJB?) is so down on his luck and realizes love doesn’t pay the bills so he needs to do something to change their lives. One day at his office job, he glances towards corporate workers in the adjacent building and sees the neighboring cemetery and in his head equates “working in corporate America” to death. Perfect. In this moment he recalls the ugly-but-kind woman from 40 years ago and realizes “maybe FREAKS can make me some money”… Literally during the first moments when he posts ads on street corners, a man comes up to him and says: “Hey you lookin for freaks? I know where you can find one of them.” He’s referring to the bearded lady working down the street who is embarrassed of her beard but has the voice of an angel. If you’re wondering: yes, nailing flyers on the wall is done to a beat to begin a song. It’s giving STOMP.

We get a lovely “we’re assembling a team” montage over a number about how we’re growing something special here. By the way, every time we do a group number we add various new background performers and about 70% of them go on without explaining what their “circus” deal is: like… woman with big white hair?? Later we see “black man with white dreadlocks”. The movie cast a man with dwarfism as Tom Thumb⁴ but the actor wasn’t short enough so they made him walk on his knees and used VFX to remove his legs and every shot with him looks like it was born out of Kid Pix — girl the VFX! FREAKS!

After this, HJB has basically assembled a Ripley’s Believe It or Not museum. It isn’t until another passerby calls this outlandish tomfoolery a “circus” that they lean in and call it that — the moral is that the best ideas come from unlikely sources; keep an open mind. All is well but oh no we don’t have any funding! (Miscast Michelle Williams does not have access to papa’s money because she left her fortune to be with HJB). So we run into Rich Investor Zac Efron, in a role that absolutely was intended for Aaron Tveit but Grease Live! must not have performed well enough for his agent to support a jump from stage to screen. And from here we’re off to the races, to the most homoerotic number in a family friendly movie— The liberal agenda tbh.

cinema.

The circus is doing so well now that they get an invitation to go mingle with the Queen. I would love to see how these people get from New York to the UK but they skip that part. Not even an America’s Next Top Model-style airplane graphic. It’s here where we run in to Dune’s Rebecca Ferguson, playing a “Swedish singer” with a perfect British English accent in a completely cuttable B-story except for her one song that would go on to be covered by Kelly Clarkson and make its way on her Meaning of Life Tour setlist. Seeing this tour in January 2019, I did not know this song but knew it was from this movie because 2017’s The Greatest Showman is culture. We hear this song, Never Enough⁵, when Dune’s Rebecca Ferguson packs a theater house to sing exclusively one song, get a standing ovation, and leave, like it’s a Jingle Ball setlist or something (she later takes this tour and we must wonder if her show is longer than 4 minutes???).

This is what I tell people Ohio is like. (No I don’t remember this screenshot’s context in the movie but it looks important)

So much shit goes down at this fancy one-song concert event though. Strap in:

Rich Investor Zac Efron is now hot for Trapeze Zendaya, who’s role in this story is to be the only character of color with dialogue so when she runs into rich white people (Zac’s rich investor parents), they call her “the help”. She said “I will show up for my 7 lines and my song and I will only be visible in 2-3 of the ensemble numbers.” These two former Disney Channel stars have a sort of Romeo + Juliet forbidden-love story and they sing about how they can rewrite the stars to align and they can be in love.

Anyway after Trapeze Zendaya is maligned as the help, and the freaks are not allowed in the fancy Queen’s gala, we segue into multi-award nominated “This Is Me”. This is the one song you know if you’ve never even heard of this movie. It’s… not the greatest one but was performed at the Oscars! It lost to Coco’s “Remember Me” on a night mostly swept by The Shape of Water. Throwback Thursday!

But back to Dune’s Rebecca Ferguson, the only cast member to not actually sing (her casting does not track for me, but I already used the headline “Miscast” for Miscast Michelle Williams)… HJB sees dollar signs in this touring one-song singer and takes her on tour — if it sounds sus, there is definitely an ulterior motive!! Miscast Michelle Williams (MMW?) doesn’t like this, saying they have enough money already and saying such lines as: “When will it ever be enough for you?” As if she didn’t hear the hit song 9 minutes ago about nothing ever being enough. Put your critical thinking cap on, honey. This leaves MMW alone in her circus-funded mansion to sing the only not-good song of the whole thing. Not linking to it. Cut it!

Dune’s Rebecca Ferguson tricks HJB into kissing her on stage and the press send it to print in all the papers!! MMW gets light of it and is very sad, but I think she gets over it as the action needs to escalate in the next set piece:

While HJB is away, Rich Investor Zac Efron now runs the circus. But the townsfolk protest it every day: they cannot stand for having un-pretty people in their city (their city, mind you, is New York City, these townspeople are New Yorkers). They shout lines like “You and your freaks and your spooks need to leave!” (verbatim). Our hero freak group then use their “abnormalities” to participate in a brawl, like when the “world’s heaviest man” belly-bumps a bad guy; perfect fight choreo. This escalates quickly and ends in the circus burning down. In this sad scene where everyone looks on, we see real elephants in the sad crowd. Somewhere along the line we just acquired two real elephants? (At one point early on we see visibly fake wooden elephants, but these ones move.)

Rich Investor Zac Efron after the fire takes down the circus.

But afterwards, when Trapeze Zendaya visits him in the hospital, we get a closeup at his hands, and it warmed me to know that Rich Investor Zac Efron may be beautiful, but he has stubby little fingernails like me. He’s is actually very good in this movie⁶ and based on staring very closely at his body (huh? what? who said that?) he must’ve filmed this before Baywatch (2017) when he proceeded to hulk out and lose control of his facial fillers.

We’re really at our low point here. We’re left with sad freaks who still believe in themselves (brave) and they sing a banger about “coming back home” (to where, the charred studs of their theater? okay). We learn that, quote, “Real estate in Manhattan is terrible investment […] all we need is a tent.” We skip the next fifteen hours or so, including how we procure a silly red and white striped circular tent. Whatever— ICONIC CIRCUS IMAGERY!

“I’M COMING, MY FREAKS!”

It is at this peak success moment when we get a big final number, elephants included, HJB realizes that all is not well until he prioritizes his family. In the end, HJB is a bad man and I’m not even sure he learns his lesson, that he should care for his band of freaks people as more than just an income source. When he finally has the chance to celebrate all that they’ve overcome, he just abandons this whole circus bit? He passes his top hat and Rich Investor Zac Efron Pokémon-evolves into Ringmaster Zac Efron. Hugh Jackman Barnum runs home to see his two daughters, at which time the girls yell “DADDY!!!” in unison for no less than the third time.

This movie ends with a quote, as if it is a legitimate biopic: “The noblest of art is that of making others happy.” Tell that to PT Barnum, who was a terror to everyone he met!!!!!

“Who can say if I've been changed for the better? But because I knew you, I have been changed for good.” - an original quote by me on Southwest 5214 from Chicago Midway to LAX. Five stars. I watched it again the same week to fact check this piece. For journalism.

1. If you want my opinions of 2017 as a YEAR in film… I’ll give them to you unprompted.

2. I usually balk at calling a movie a “film” because I’m not pretentious but… for the bit.

3. And this name seems immediately fake but I googled it and was comforted when I saw his next spouse was named NANCY FISH. What kind of SpongeBob tea…

4. These are all real people according to Wikipedia.

5. This song is a musical theater-ified version of Britney Spears’ “Lucky”. Dune’s Rebecca Ferguson is so lucky, she's a star, but she cry, cry, cries in her lonely heart, thinking if there's nothing missing in my life, then why do these tears come at night?

6. I wonder where in Zac Efron’s career he decided to lean into singing. He’s good but for the screen I suppose, and I can’t envision him on stage, maybe a label that fits every other one of these cast members (except Hugh Jackman who has famously been in theater). Do you thrive on spurting the fun fact that Zac Efron does not sing in the first High School Musical movie? Do you then wonder if he was cast just for his appearance and then when a sequel was greenly he said “let me try”? Then we get Hairspray… The Greatest Showman… anyway “Breaking Free” from HSM is an iconic karaoke duet if you have a willing friend.