The Greatest Showman

Year 10, Day 120 - 4/30/18 - Movie #2,922

BEFORE: It's the last day of April, and what a weird month it has been!  I covered everything from pirates to orcs to trolls and mini-Bratzies.  Somebody got killed on a train, someone else SAW someone get killed while on a train, and also the guys from "Trainspotting" got back together.  Jane lost her husband, and so did Dolores Claiborne, a butcher lost his step-son, Mildred lost her daughter, and so did an advertising executive played by Will Smith.  Anna Kendrick dated a hit-man, and then bonded with a bunch of losers at a wedding.  Russell Crowe's character inherited a vineyard, the Grace family inherited Spiderwick Estate, and T'Challa inherited the kingdom of Wakanda.  Then Hardcore Henry fought the army of cyber-zombies, the CIA and some hippies faked the moon landing, and let's not forget that a guy got turned into a walrus.  Wow, that all sounds very stressful in retrospect.

But the month began with Jesus, and now it ends with P.T. Barnum.  Make of that what you will.  Hugh Jackman carries over from "Butter" on Netflix to this one, which I'm watching on an Academy screener - though it's available now on PPV, as I'm reminded every time I turn on the On Demand channel, where a 10-second promo is running about twice every minute.  Seriously?

THE PLOT: The tale of P.T. Barnum, a visionary who rose from nothing to create a spectacle that became a worldwide sensation.

AFTER: I can't help but feel that in many ways, this film is employing a lot of revisionist history - Barnum here is referred to as the inventor of "show business", but was he?  I'll allow the portrayal of him as the inventor (or co-inventor) of what eventually became the modern circus, but ALL of show business?  The film itself depicts Barnum traveling on the road with Swedish singer Jenny Lind, if there was no show business before Barnum invented it, then where did Jenny Lind perform?  How did people even know to come out to an auditorium and exchange their money for a ticket?

This is really an over-simplification, to say that Barnum "invented" show business.  Hadn't the theater been around for a few thousand years?  What about the performance of Shakespeare's plays at the Globe Theater, wasn't old Billy Shakes involved in the day-to-day business of theater operations, paying actors, doing publicity via town crier, etc.?  You've got to be kidding me, Barnum couldn't have been the first person to figure out how to sell tickets to something.

Furthermore, there's a very modern take here on things like diversity, racism, transgender issues, all because Barnum created this thing called the sideshow, and for that he hired people of all sizes, colors, and disabilities.  The odder, the better, really, because it turned out that people would show up in droves to take a peek at these "curiosities", like the dog-faced boy, the Siamese (now called "conjoined") twins, the "world's fattest man", Tom Thumb the dwarf, and so on.  Barnum's show thrived during the days before the internet, because people generally had no way to prove that the person they paid a dime to see was NOT the "world's fattest man", and for that matter they weren't allowed to get close enough to weigh that person, or even confirm that he hadn't stuffed a few pillows up his shirt to make himself even fatter.

The timing is also a little suspicious here, because the company Barnum founded, which eventually became Ringling Brothers, Barnum & Bailey circus, finally shuttered its doors last year, due to a combination of factors no doubt, including declining attendance in the age of the internet, rising costs, and an overall decrease in relevance.  Toss in allegations of extensive animal abuse, and other controversies stemming from an apparent lack of social correctness.  I can't help but think that the circus held on about 10 years longer than it should have, I was ready for them to go the way of the dinosaur just for the animal rights issues alone.  This entire business was built on exploitation, all the way around - you just can't tell me that the circus lifestyle was attractive to anyone who hadn't used up all of their other available work options.

So now we've got a film telling us that P.T. Barnum was not only the consummate showman, he was a champion of minorities and the disabled, like some kind of combination of Steven Spielberg, Albert Schweitzer and Martin Luther King.  Yeah, I'm going to be double-checking on that.  While he obviously did hire people who may have been on the outskirts of society, how well were they all treated?  Is it better to live in a nice house with your family and be afraid of going outside, or to live on the road, away from your family and be famous, gawked at by an army of ridiculing fans?  Is it better to serve in heaven, or rule in hell?  Debate.

So this concept of the "freak show" gets served back to us, decades after the fact, as if it was somehow an empowerment issue, before that was even a thing.  And don't get me wrong, I'm glad that times have changed, that people feel more comfortable talking about gender issues and non-binary pronouns and being people being comfortable no matter what their age, skin color, or body type.  All that is good stuff, and we've come a long way - but let's not pretend that things back in the 1840's were all sunshine and rainbows when they weren't.  There was no ADA, there were no civil rights laws in many places, and people could pretty much do anything they wanted to anyone else if that person was perceived as "different" or "less than" in some way.  Diversity was just not seen as part of "humanity" then, in fact just the opposite was true - people went to see the "dog-faced boy" because they believed that person was part animal, not just a guy with a hairy face.  And Barnum definitely took advantage of people's fear of, and fascination with people who were different.  I'm thinking that the only color in the diversity rainbow that he cared about was the green of people's money.

Let's just take one of these "freak" archetypes as an example, the bearded lady.  Years ago I went to the famous sideshow down in Coney Island, it's now sort of an artistic model of the old "ten act" sideshows from the past, only each performer serves about three functions.  The bearded lady (who's also the sword swallower and the "electric lady" at other times during the act, took questions from the audience and spoke plainly about what it meant to be a lady with a beard.  (And hers was a neat, thin beard, not the over-sized cartoonish one portrayed in this film...)  Speaking plainly, this woman told the audience in a very matter-of-fact way that most women have some form of facial hair, only society has dictated that they should shave it, pluck it, wax it or electrolyze it, and she was just a lady who had chosen not to do this.  It wasn't a transgender thing, it wasn't a broad social statement, she just grew out her beard.  That's it, very simple, she wasn't championing a non-binary reflection on society's outdated moral codes - she was just a woman who didn't shave her face for a while.

And this is how people who are different should move the needle on social issues, by standing in front of a crowd and being open and honest and answering questions about their lifestyle, which may be different from those of the people in the crowd.  "Step right up, but a ticket and see the freaky bearded lady!" seems very antiquated by comparison, and I just wonder if the methods of P.T. Barnum should be celebrated in a film, because they did more over the years to separate people than they did to bring them together.  "Hey, come over here and look at the freaks!  This lady's got a ton of tattoos, and this guy's looks like he has a third leg!"  You just can't tell me this guy was celebrating diversity, he was turning a profit at the expense of people who were unusual.  So this film's cop-out of "I'm a lady with a beard, there's absolutely nothing I can do about it, so I'm going to say "screw it" and use this experience to become empowered!" ends up ringing just a bit hollow.

If modern people want to feel empowered by the song "This Is Me", because it's being sung by people who are shorter, taller, fatter or hairier than nearly everyone else, I guess that's a good thing, but it's really like polishing a turd here.  It seems a bit like patting Hitler on the back for giving Jewish people a warm place to live, or a community where they can all gather and be Jewish together.  It's just probably not the way that things went down.  The truth about circus folks and carnival trash is that they moved around from place to place because they HAD to.  Eventually they'd meet with intolerance from the locals on some level, who after being entertained by the Siamese twins or the wild pygmies, suddenly then decided they didn't want them in their town.  Let's face it, given the bigotry and narrow-mindedness that still exists in the U.S. today, back in the mid-1800's it was probably a thousand times worse, so a nomadic lifestyle was probably always in the cards for circus folk.  And then during the off-season months, Ringling Brothers circus would hunker down in Florida.  Again, I'm going to leave you to draw your own conclusions there.

There are other real-world reasons for why the circus was the way it was.  Why a tent instead of a building?  Well, this way the circus never has to pay rent or any property tax, just roll up the big top, load the canvas on a train, and it's off to the next city.  Rent an unused field in the next town, or some space down by the docks, and they're back in business.  Sawdust on the floor is cheaper than wood, peanuts and popcorn are about the cheapest food with the highest profit margin, and so on.  Cotton candy?  Come on, it's about 1% sugar and 99% air, isn't it?

And whither Bailey?  According to this film, Barnum's partner in show biz was Philip Carlyle, but don't we all know it was James Anthony Bailey?  If the filmmakers couldn't get the rights to Bailey's name and likeness, probably because their intent was to champion one partner and minimize the involvement of the other, then quite plainly, we're just not getting the whole story here.  The replacement character, Carlyle, is almost a complete blank, we never really get to know much about him, except that he came from money, and saved his earnings from the circus so he could bail it out and become Barnum's partner.  (Didn't he learn?  You never put your OWN MONEY into the show...). Oh, and he falls for the attractive trapeze artist, but so what?  Anybody can fall in love with the young, shapely acrobat.  If they wanted this character to be interesting, he should have been attracted for the bearded lady, or even the dog-faced boy.  I mean, we're trying celebrate "diversity" before its time, right?  So put your money where your mouth is.

If "Butter" was an allegory for the 2008 Democratic Primaries, then perhaps by extension the story of P.T. Barnum is more obviously Trump-related.  According to this film, Barnum got the loan to create his first museum by claiming to hold the deeds to seven clipper vessels in the South China Sea, without mentioning that those ships were currently residing at the bottom of said sea, and therefore worthless.  And the news just broke that Trump probably falsified his net worth by claiming many of his father's holdings as his own, in order to get himself on to the very first Fortune 500 list, and then he probably leveraged THAT to get more loans, and borrow further against collateral that he just didn't have.  It sure sounds familiar, and I bet if we were to scratch the surface there would be many more similarities between Barnum and Trump.  Both took advantage of the disabled in public, both took great delight in separating other people from their money, and both were in charge of circus shows, one literal and the other figurative.  Really, at the end of the day, is there any difference between being a circus ringmaster and presiding over Trump Air, Trump Steaks and Trump University?

Also starring Michelle Williams (last seen in "Take This Waltz"), Zac Efron (last seen in "Mike and Dave Need Wedding Dates"), Rebecca Ferguson (last seen in "The Girl on the Train"), Zendaya (last seen in "Spider-Man: Homecoming"), Keala Settle (last seen in "Ricki and the Flash"), Yahya Abdul-Mateen II, Eric Anderson, Sam Humphrey, Austyn Johnson, Cameron Seely, Paul Sparks (last seen in "Midnight Special"), Natasha Liu Bordizzo, Daniel Everidge, Gayle Rankin, Will Swenson, Byron Jennings (last seen in "True Story"), Betsy Aidem (last seen in "Music of the Heart"), Fredric Lehne, Kathryn Meisle, Damian Young, Tina Benko, Caoife Coleman, Mishay Petronelli, Shannon Holtzapffel, Luciano Acuna Jr., Danial Son, Yusaku Komori, Jonathan Redavid, Nick Jantz, Timothy Hughes.

RATING: 5 out of 10 shot glasses