The Greatest Showman

With a story that’s been told before, mixed-to-negative reviews and a no-name director, I decided to just watch The Greatest Showman sometime in the future, perhaps on a plane. But we had free time as a family so went to see this. And I was very pleasantly surprised. I really enjoyed The Greatest Showman, not just for being a fun, enjoyable film but for so upending my expectations about it in the context of 2017 identity politics.

Barnum on the face of it would be a terrible place to try and make a politically correct story. Look at this old white man from a generation ago who gathered ‘freaks’ and basically made his fortune from mocking the disabled. This fraudster who sewed animal parts together for a mermaid and who’s often thought of as saying there’s a sucker born every minute (whether it was genuinely him who said it or not). What an awful choice for a modern-day movie protagonist. This disgusting man first gained fame parading around a paralysed former slave he had ‘leased’, claiming her to be the oldest woman in the world, then charged admission to her autopsy when she passed away.

And the movie landscape has been irrevocably altered by recent preoccupation with minority representation, for good and for bad. Greater diversity makes for some really nice dynamics in ensemble movies like Rogue One, but then on the flip side you have it becoming so central to a movie’s marketing that it ends up alienating a lot of the audience and Ghostbusters gets written off as disastrous. Right now there’s a lot of politics being applied to The Last Jedi, where critics seemingly love it far more than audiences do, and some on the left are very keen to shoe-horn it into their ideology and say that it gives a strong message of tearing down the old, patriarchal system and replacing it with a new, vibrant, diverse one – when honestly, the movie not only had a subplot that basically concluded ‘trust in the old guard who know what they’re doing and don’t try to make it all about you as you attempt to wrest power away from them’, but also didn’t honestly end up telling a very good story anyway.

Which brings us to The Greatest Showman. Of course, this is a fictionalised version, and needs to be to give the message it does. No Joice Heth the paralyzed old lady. Very little lying and cheating, and carefully only where it does no harm to others. A sympathetic Barnum who comes from nothing, loves his wife and two beautiful daughters (the tragedy of another daughter dying at age 2 and his second wife never entering the picture), buys an unsuccessful museum of curios on a whim and gleefully subverts criticism, is a far cry from the truth but works here. Hugh Jackman is superb as a performer and as a family man here, and his story arc is satisfying – he is drawn away from his progressive and diverse troupe by the lure of appealing to the established patriarchal establishment through the highbrow opera singing of Jenny Lind, but it ends up almost ruining him and losing him everything he built (with a fire from the civil war era transposed for effect). In reality, of course, the tour was a huge success that taught him nothing of his own flaws.

But crucial here is the treatment of Barnum’s acts. What makes this a triumph for identity politics is that they are not the sideshow, they are not abused or exploited. They are empowered, they are probably the best thing about the movie in terms of uplifting and moving performances, and they are not only the reason Barnum reaches success, but what bring him back to earth and support him in his moments of need, too. One character points out that he was putting forward those who nobody else would, ‘as equals’, and Barnum’s fall from grace here happens because he turns his back on his diverse and unusual entertainers and chases after the conventional.

I’m not saying this element is done perfectly for the approval of the far left. In reality, General Tom Thumb had a lot more to do with Barnum becoming as successful as he was, and if anything his role in this movie was massively understated. With a couple of exceptions, the troupe was more of a collective than a group of well-characterised individuals, which isn’t really in the spirit of celebrating their uniqueness. For all its diversity and Zac Efron and Zendaya’s sweet love story meant to highlight the foolishness of disapproving of race mixing, at its heart there’s still a lot of the white saviour to this story. And yeah, animal rights don’t get a look in.

But reframing the Barnum story as a celebration of diversity rather than railing at exploitation, giving agency and focus to the so-called freaks, was a small stroke of genius in my book. Add to that strong performances, superb visuals, great dancing and vocal performances – from Zendaya in particular – and the best songs I’ve heard in a live-action musical for a very long time (way better than La La Land’s, most of the numbers having a great modern feel, like if Sia decided to write music in the Disney mould) made this far better than I expected it to be.