The Greatest Showman Review

Nobody involved wanted to make a film about the real P.T. Barnum, who exhibited an enslaved woman and lied about her age for profit, and the scrubbing is so total that the movie becomes a fable about a kind man who gives outcasts a stage. Accept that premise and what remains is a musical built like a commercial, which is the trade Michael Gracey came from.

Seamus McGarvey shoots the numbers in warm amber and lets the camera ride with the dancers instead of chopping them into confetti, and the bar sequence where Jackman and Zac Efron slide shot glasses down the counter runs nearly unbroken. Pasek and Paul write anthems rather than songs, every one built to the same swelling shape, so by the fourth chorus the emotional grammar is spent.

Keala Settle carries the single number that earns its size. Jackman works harder than the script does, selling ambition and shame in scenes that allow him three lines to do it. The trapeze duet between Efron and Zendaya is the one passage where the staging and the feeling agree. Elsewhere the film substitutes momentum for story, cutting away from every consequence before it can cost anybody anything.