The Greatest Showman--a Hugh Jackman vehicle based on the life of circus godfather P.T. Barnum -- is an anomoly in that it was released in the sink-or-swim period in the last couple weeks of December and looked like it was going to sink because of critical panning but somehow still found audience. It has consistently placed it in the Box Office top 10 throughout the entirety of January and February. This past weekend it was in 6th place in the 9th week of release with an extremely healthy $6 million dollars, while Star Wars: The Last Jedi isn't even in the top 20 anymore (David Simms at the Atlantic has a good essay about this)
This dissonance was also inherent in my viewing experience. On the one hand, I found myself emotionally moved by the film and even shed a tear or two at the love story and the way this man uplifted the lives of all these outsiders. At the same time, I felt something was off. Good criticism is about reacting honestly and articulating that reaction. In this case, it took me a while to articulate that to myself. Ultimately, I found two main faults in the film.
The first was that this was a biopic of the old-fashioned model (The Darkest Hour, Aviator, and Selma represent the latter model of focusing on a period of said historic figure's life) where there was a need to check off every part of this man's life without any discernment for which parts need more deep focus. With the musical numbers taking up so much of the running time, it puts a chronological stretch and the result was a superficial look at Barnum's life.
The second is something that I agree with the film critics in one of their gripes but in a different way than they state it. One of the many beefs of the critics (they also found the songs unusually bland and various plot holes) is the deviation from history but I regularly go to the website www.chasingthefrog.com and don't think the film is more ahistorical than your average work of historical fiction. In particular, this was a 19th century figure, and while audiences at large generally assume we have as much material available about someone 150 years ago as we do about someone 50 years ago, I can assure you as a researcher at the National Archives that's simply not true.
The quote "there's a sucker born every minute" is something that the film's detractors are saying is attributed to Barnum but that's not a certainty. Part of this is the mass of critical consensus generally picks up on issues of racism in ways that are overemphasizing. While Barnum was exploitative of black members in his employ, there seems little evidence that he was any more exploitative of that class of people than anyone else, and in missing the trees for the forest, he was a staunch abolitionist (it's theorized his theater got burned down by confederate allies).
Moreso, the idea that he was exploitative would have made him a great biopic subject because that's what made him complicated. He uplifted people's lives while also feeding off these people. It's a Faustian bargain the freaks had to make but it couldn't be denied that they'd rather be in the circus than not. This film, of course, was too glossy and superficial to deal with that and if you were thinking this film had an obligation to do so, you were looking for the wrong movie.
To the degree that the film deals with anything thematic, it's about the protagonist's self-actualization being tied to class and his need to shed the chip off his shoulder from once being on the lower rungs of society. The freaks in his employ turn out to be part of his salvation but they are still pushed to the side more than they could have and some scenes don't deal with this as much as they could. In particular, the scene where Jackman
At the end of the day, however, I agree with the film critics, because I didn't feel like I was watching PT Barnum. It wasn't historical inaccuracy, however, but rather, the relationship of the project to its lead: It was well-publicized that this was Jackman's pet project. It was clearly Hugh Jackman the gregarious song and dance man I was seeing on the screen and not any attempt at immersion into a part. That kind of approach might have been ok in the biopics of the old days (Gary Cooper in Pride of the Yankees or Cary Grant in Night and Day are those two guys just carrying their winning personas on screen) but it doesn't fly today.
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